Actually, I did watch the speech -- and the previous one -- and the sheer craziness of Obama's remarks about not hunkering down in complete contradiction to what he was then proposing to do in the same speeches! was what prompted my remarks.   I have a historian's interest in watching empires lose complete sense -- the Romans, the British, the French. They all find themselves having to deal with people who refuse to come out on the playing field and fight like civilized armies, and they just go all to pieces. They build walls and buy more tanks and extend their borders, and still those bastards won't come out and fight right and be defeated like good enemies! Trying to put out Al-Qaeda is like stomping on mercury. It is a network, operating mostly through the Internet, and based on a mixture of people pissed off at American policies (including dropping bombs from a great height on anyone they don't like), as well as nutcases. The main recruits are not in Afghanistan or the Yemen -- they are educated people in Britain and Germany and so on. This is all so obvious, but no one can deal with it in a military empire. It's not a war: it's a psycho-political struggle. And Obama knows this (or knew it) and he has capitulated to the "war" mentality. The main person Obama is frightened by is Dick Cheney -- who is (in my books) a terrorist -- if the definition of a terrorist is someone who thrives on terrorising people. In fact, Dick Cheney may be the most successful terrorist of our time.

yours,

Peter T.