I am so sorry for your loss. Your words reveal a deep devotion to your brother. I will keep your family in my prayers.
Lando 
Posted on 05/06/2004 11:07:56 PM PDT by quidnunc
Can we stop for a moment, take a deep breadth, and remember the hysteria of the last three years — and then learn something from it?
What did we do to deserve September 11? Cannot we provide a Marshall Plan for the Middle East? Who let our guard down — who became paranoid and passed the Patriot Act? Shouldn’t we at least listen to what bin Laden is saying?
Why kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan? The British and Russians failed and so will we. The peaks are too high; the Northern Alliance is a sham. We can’t fight during Ramadan. There are too few troops. After four weeks, let’s face it: we are in a Vietnam quagmire. Who let bin Laden and Mullah Omar escape? Consensual government will never work with these people. We murdered tens of thousands of innocent Afghans. The country is no better off than before. Can’t we get NATO or the UN into Kabul? Are our air-dropped food packages deliberately made to look like cluster bombs — and laced as well with fatty peanut-butter and jelly?
Who are these neocons? Wasn’t the invasion cooked-up years ago for the Likud party? Don’t preempt or be unilateral in Iraq — but who screwed up in not preempting before 9-11? If we strike Saddam Hussein there will be millions of refugees. Thousands of Americans will die. Moderate governments will fall. We will kill millions of Iraqis. The oil fields will go up in smoke. We want only cheap gas — we will cause gas to skyrocket if we go in. Pay the poor Turks — don’t be blackmailed by them. There are far too few troops. It will be a bloodbath — it was a bullying walkover.
-snip-
We have been fighting two wars all along. The easier one was against the fascists in the Middle East, whom we demolished in Afghanistan in less than eight weeks and routed in Iraq in three — while rounding them up worldwide and preventing another 9-11 attack here at home. But the other challenge? Now that has been nearly impossible to win. For here in the West we are split into two widely divergent groups who disagree about almost everything that has transpired since September 11, a cataclysmic event that apparently exposed a widening fault line.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
FMCDH
He sounds like a wonderful human being. How wonderful that he was able to escape the USSR and have some years of happiness and freedom.
I am so sorry for your loss. Your words reveal a deep devotion to your brother. I will keep your family in my prayers.
Lando
You've nailed it.
The weekend news cycle is now so vile that I can no longer stomach it.
The one ray of light is that there still remains a plurality of common-sense Americans who get what is at stake. Despite all the spin by the Leftist Mediacrats, there is a center that is still holding firm. This would not have been possible without alternative sources of information and analysis like FR, Talk Radio and Fox News. AS VDH states
This fight for the future of Iraq is turning out to be for more than a referendum on democracy in the Middle East, but rather a trial of our own culture here at home.
"breadth"????
Very unlike VDH to have a typo. I see it has been fixed on his website now.
That concievably could be my mistaske.
I don't cut and past from the web page to FR, I first download to my word processor and reformat to suit myself — changing all hyphens, double hyphens, etc, to M dashes flanked by spaces.
I also standardize the capitalization of headlines, omit capitalization at the beginning of paragraphs and do a number of other things to make the articles — all of which I keep in an archive — more pleasing to my eye.
So the misspelling may not have been Hanson's fault.
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