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Posted
Haha. Me? Mr. nine different names on this board!  :P  :P

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Jesus H. Christ, I've got one. This one. The other was brought out of retirement for a use requiring more dignity than can be achieved by a "Crap Throwing Monkey".

Posted
:P

Bite me, you overgrown red-headed swine.  :doh:

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He doesn't have red hair. :P And....he's gorgeous :P .....and....this wine is really good.

Posted
He doesn't have red hair.  :P  And....he's gorgeous  :P .....and....this wine is really good.

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You never heard of the red-headed stepchild comment? :P

Harrrrrrrrrrrrrriet...

 

Oh yeah, Tom is as gorgeous as one of my deuces.

Posted
Israeli ground troops are in southern lebanon: their mission is to destroy Hizb'Allah outpost.

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Unsurprising. The Israeli strikes looked like they were intended to isolate the southern third of the country...i.e. support ground troops entering Lebanon.

Posted
Unsurprising.  The Israeli strikes looked like they were intended to isolate the southern third of the country...i.e. support ground troops entering Lebanon.

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I'd read something similar yesterday. Also that they'd need at least another week to complete their mission against Hezbollah. Kind of reminds me of the Yom Kippur War - "Don't call for a cease fire until we get what we want."

 

I still marvel at the fact that I find out about this stuff from the PPP section of TSW.

 

"Hey didja hear the news about Israel? Oh man, it was all over the Bills message board..." :P

Posted
This situation needs resolving one way or the other. My feeling is that a brief, bloody solution is a better one than the alternative of another century's worth of "death of a thousand cuts" war.

Ummm . . . how do I put this? A brief solution to the Middle East's problems may not be readily available.

 

The root cause of these problems is an aspect of human nature. People, along with certain species of primates, are instinctively capable of getting themselves into tribal wars. Such wars have cropped up in Africa, in pre-Columbian North America, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, and in many other places. With most tribal wars, it's hard to figure out who's responsible for starting things; but it's easy to see that the conflict will go on indefinitely.

 

The Arab-Israeli conflict is no different. The two sides have come to hate each other. This conflict need not concern the U.S., except inasmuch as our dependence on foreign oil has forced us to pay attention to the Middle East. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we eliminate this dependence, the better we'll be served.

 

The U.S. chose to take the Israeli side in the tribal war between that nation and the Muslims. As a result of this decision, the tribal hatred the Muslims had for the Israelis spilled over onto America. This hatred has caused the U.S. considerable trouble. On the other hand, Israel has done little or nothing to advance America's interest in that region. Israel's government was elected to advance Israel's interests, not America's. As a general rule, it's naive to expect any nation's government to sacrifice its own interests to help ours.

 

For this reason, the only truly helpful alliances are those in which the interests of the two nations are naturally aligned. For example, it was in the interest of the various NATO nations to band together to prevent a Soviet invasion. But the alliance between the U.S. and Israel doesn't fall into this category. The U.S. needs to buy oil from the Middle East. Israel needs to at least hold its own in the tribal war between itself and the Muslim world. There's no overlap between these two interests.

 

The U.S. should cut itself off from the Middle East as much as possible. On the one hand, we should avoid trying to influence them; either through our military, our political ideas, or our materialistic mass media. On the other, we should reduce or eliminate ways in which Arab nations try to interact with us. Ending immigration from Middle Eastern countries would reduce the threat of domestic terrorism, while giving a boost to the American worker. Gradually eliminating our dependence on foreign oil would reduce the trade deficit, help the environment, and would allow us to further isolate ourselves from the Middle East and its problems.

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