Geez, Carol! Well, okay....but people like that seem to be as rare as hen's teeth hereabouts... ;-) I'm clearly not living in the Bible Belt. Anyway, I still think it has little to do with national policy. National policy is driven by imperial ambitions, as it always has been.


Doug - Wars happen when one nation has something that another nation wants and the other nation is willing to use violence to get it...NOT when citizens are "in danger". Governments don't give a tiddly about their citizens being in danger, but they find it very handy as a rallying cry when they want to start a war.

But once the war starts...THEN, Doug, citizens of both countries are in danger from the moment the war begins until it ends...but AFTER the fighting starts, not before. I know you're thinking in terms of the 911 attack, but 911 was not an act of war. It was a privately arranged criminal act. It was not an act perpetrated by any government or any nation or the armed forces of any nation. It was a criminal act perpetrated by a small, hidden cadre of people operating in secret and NOT representing any government or sovereign nation. That is not an act of war, it's a privately committed criminal act.

It does not and cannot serve as justification for entering into a war with any sovereign nation, since no sovereign nation planned it, wanted it or executed it. All sovereign nations expressed great sympathy for the USA when it happened, (Iran included).

Such an act calls for a criminal investigation, that's what it calls for. It's a police matter, not a military matter.

It has no bearing on a discussion concerning people killed in war, because it was not an act of war. It was a crime.

No country is stupid enough to attack the USA in that fashion, because it invites a massive retaliation...and the USA has massive powers of retaliation. It is only a privately organized group of conspirators who will ever commit such a crime. By doing so, they no doubt hoped to provoke several wars between nations, and they have succeeded in doing so, because the Bush administration wanted such wars anyway. It was convenient to their future desires and plans. So convenient, in fact, that one can't help but wonder exactly who some of the criminals who planned 911 were. (?)

I bet they weren't all sitting in a cave in Afghanistan.

Iraq and Afghanistan have been the primary victims of the wars that resulted from that criminal act. They haven't lost a few thousand people, Doug, they've lost hundreds of thousands of people. THEY are the primary injured parties in this mess, not you. You've just got an economy that is totally screwed now, that's all. Count your blessings, because it could be a whole lot worse. You could have dead people lying in the streets, and a foreign army occupying your country.

That's what they've got, and they were not responsible for 911.

There was no war, Doug, until America decided to pretend that a criminal act was "an act of war" and started a real war. Then there was a war, all right. Now there are 2 wars. You can't really afford to fight even one of them.