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Be nice if we could selectively repeal the law of gravity evey once in a while.

The Cost

. An estimated total of 2,122,244 were killed and 3,650,946 wounded.
. 58,169 Americans were killed (11,465 of them were teenagers) and 304,000 wounded.
Notice more enemy casualities than American and fewer American casualities than in World War II
. More than 74,000 French had been killed before the first Americans arrived in 1956.
Yes, it was a French colony wasn't it.
. 499 Australian military personnel and 7 civilians were killed; 2 more were missing in action; 2,069 were wounded. The average Australian soldier in Vietnam was 20 years old and saw 314 days of combat in a period of one year. The average World War 11 soldier in the South Pacific had been 26 years old and saw 40 days of combat in a period of four years.
. 444,000 North Vietnamese and 220,557 South Vietnamese military personnel and 587,000 civilians were killed.
So that means we were winning until Congress pulled the plug.
. 2,590,000 Americans and 59,520 Australians served in Vietnam
. 6,727,084 tons of bombs were dropped (compared with 2,700,000 tons dropped on Germany during World War 11.)
. 3,750 fixed wing aircraft and 4,865 helicopters were lost. Australia lost 2 fixed wing aircraft and 10 helicopters.
. 3,500,000 acres of Vietnam were spayed with defoliants, the effect of which will last up to 100 years.

I see no reason to go back to Vietnam. we get along fine with Vietnam and Vietnam is not bothering us, which is more than we can say about North Korea

Solar power would work very well in the Middle East, but you don't see them trying to build solar power plants with the same gusto because you can't make bombs with them. For the amount of effort they are going through to defy the World community to build centefuges and process Uranium and Plutonium, they could have build a very decent sized Solar Power plant that could have powered many homes, if you add up the cost of their military build up and the economic sanctions they risk, they could build a very big Solar Power plant in deed, the Middle East is also a very dry place with lots of sunshine, it is a very good place to generate electricity from the Sun. Yet Iran risks going to war while trying to process its own Uranium fuel for "generate electricity," Why?

If they wanted our help they could have asked for it, threatening us, does not make us more likely to want to help. There is a saying, "Millions for Defense of the homeland, and not a penny in tribute." We are willing to spend much more to defend ourselves from the North Koreans than we are to pay them off to go away, in other words tribute.

If they support terrorists, then they are terrorists, it is as simple as that. You don't have to be the guy pulling the trigger and shooting at innocent civilians to be a terrorist.

You know you are a propagandist, you seem much more interested in generating propaganda for the Iranians and their actions than in doing anything that would benefit our side.

Do they?
Everyone thought Hitler was full of it when he called for Death to the Jews, no one paid any attention to him. He wouldn't kill Jews, they reasoned, he needed Jews to be around to blame as scapegoats when thigs went wrong for him, he'd keep them around, he wouldn't carry out his threat. All that Nazi propaganda against Jews was just so much empty rheteric. blah blah blah. No one actually thought Hitler Meant what he said, despite the fact that he wrote this book, despite all the speeches he made, the common level headed assumption made by most people before it happened was that he wouldn't do it. That people don't actually mean what they say. What proof do you have that the Iranian leader doesn't actually mean what he says. Maybe I would perhaps be inclided to agree with you if he wasn't also trying to get nuclear weapons. Maybe if Iran really was worried about a US invasion, it would stop trying to provoke one with its rheteric and it's "Death to America!" chant. Twenty-seven years of their self-generated antagonism toward us has not enhanced their security. They keep goading us and trying to build nuclear weapons, how stupid would we be if we do not take them at their word about what they intend to do, and we let them aquire nuclear weapons and this results in the deaths of millions of Americans, Israelis, and likely Iranians too. Iran wouldn't be the first nation to have committed suicide.

A pretty feeble strawman argument you have erected there. A lone nut and Islamic terrorist organizations do not compare. Nowhere has suicide terrorism been so prevalent as in the Middle East, that I have to tell you this only says that you refuse to see the argument and will not see any evidence that leads to conclusions contrary to your own. You rationalize, the Jews aren't really people, they are occupiers of colonists instead, and that the Palestinians are really killing and murdering innocent people, but "Resisting" them. So long as Jews remain faceless bogeymen called occupiers then its ok to kill them.

How do you know. Terrorists wouldn't drive cars packed full of explosives and blow themselves up either, that is not a rational assumption either. Terrorists would not fly airplanes into buildings because they would get killed, yet another rational assuption about the motivations of these people. The reason that the 9/11 attack happened is because we made rational assuptions about our enemy and didn't prepare for the possibility that our enemy was going to be irrational. Prior to 9/11 alot of our preparations against terrorist attacks was based on the rational belief that terrorists didn't want to kill themselves, they wanted to plant a bomb and run away, but they didn't want to kill themselves. That was why there was so much effort to match luggage to passengers. You are trying to make rational assuptioms about the Iranian leadership, as if somehow they don't follow the same rules as the people they send on those suicide missions. I've seen no evidence that they are somehow different from the suicide bombers they send to kill us. Hitler shot himself of course, and if Hitler can commit suicide, don't you think the Iranian leadership can as well and that their whole country with them in the process? People who are willing to kill themselves are often quite willing to kill others as well.

Muslim irrationality will only hurt themselves in the long run, they can only fool us so much and at some point we will stop buying all the liberal excuses that are made on their behalf. It does not serve the stated goals of liberalism to have the Islamic terrorists win, no matter how much they may hate America, they enemy of their enemy is not their ally.

If they won it, Algeria would still be part of the French Empire. The war was undermined from within the French Society just like the Vietnam War was undermined by traitors in American society. The traitors are at it again trying to undermine our fight against terrorists, trying to portray the terrorists as the good guys in this conflict, or at least paint ourselves as equivalent to them if they cannot achieve the former. Stop trying to reach out to them and understand them, when all they want to do is destroy your society. Don't feel too guilty about being French, about being Christian or about being Western Europeans, you should stop having to appologize to them for being yourselves and not bowing down to Mecca and praying 5 times a day.

When you start a total war against your enemy and you lose, you lose big. The Japanese were quite fanatical too, and they were probably our first experience with this Eastern style of suicide fanatacism. Hiroshima and Nagasaki also give me hope that we can win this war on terrorism. I truly hope that another "Hiroshima and Nagasaki" aren't necessary to stop the Iranians from aquiring nuclear weapons, I don't want to lose a US city before we do something about Iran either, and I don't want them dictating terms our our surrender. The best thing to do on purely human terms is to invade and overthrow the Iranian government. The Democrats are too afraid of the present cost ih human terms to avoid a greater cost in the future, so I'm afraid it may come to nuclear war if we want to save our soldier's lives now by not invading. Are we prepared to lose millions of lives in the future and whole cities because we didn't stop Iran when it was still cheap to do so?

What is worse, losing 10,000 soldiers lives over 10 years or 30 million in a single day? I think a small nuclear war with Iran might kill 30 million Americans, assuming the Iranians had a dozen nukes or so.

All Iranians don't have to be mad enough, just like all Germans don't have to be mad enough to start World War II, it is their leader who decides to push the button. There are Iranians trained to commit suicide upon the command of the Iranian leader. I find that people who are willing to kill themselves are also quite willing to commit mass murder besides. Is it racism? I don't know. I do know that we've had alot of bad experiences with the Iranians since their Islamic revolution, I don't have much faith in either their rationality or in their good behavior, and look at the trouble were having in Iraq with Muslims who blow themselves up killing other people. The very same argument you use that we should get out of Iraq is the same argument I use that we should not let the Iranians have nuclear weapons no matter what, and if they do get nuclear weapons, we should stop them no matter what the cost and prevent them from building more so they can do more damage to us. If its a nuclear war, then its better fought sooner when we can win at the loss of only a few cities, than later where it will involve our total destruction. I have no faith that Iranians can be deterred, and this is due to their history of fanatacism. Suicide bombing is all too common, and we can't pretend its not happening or that their leaders are somehow rational when many of their followers are not.

Besides, our nuclear weapons have not deterred them from making terrorist attacks against us. Each time they make an attack, they want to push just a little bit further and they get just a little bit braver with each attack that succeeds and that we don't respond to.

Pakistan is ruled by a rational leader, he is not a religious fanatic, his main interest is asserting power and controlling his country, he realizes that the USA is the Superpower and if push comes to shove, it will prevail over the terrorists, and he wants to be on the right side when it happens. The Pakistani populace is more emotional and less rational, they may push Mushariff aside and replace him with a religious fanatic who's more willing to push the button.
You assume alot about the ayatollah's, you assume firstly that they are faking their religion and all their pretentions to religious faith is all an act for the benefit of the masses, but what if they assume that God is really on their side and that the USA's nuclear deterrent does not matter? They may launch their missiles and count on Allah to stop our retaliation, it may not be true, but if they believe that they may press the button. Your quite willing to find out by letting the Iranians have nukes knowing that if your wrong, only Americans and Iranians will pay for it.

A woman was just killed in a Kasam Rocket attack on Israel. I guess the Palestinians didn't really know who it was they were trying to kill with their random rocket attacks. Was that woman really oppressing the Palestinians so much? Unlike the Palestinians, the Israelis know who their targets are, they have a specific person they want to hit and a specific group of terrorists they want to go after. I don't see much symmetry between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Do a people, that wantonly launches random rockets toward a general area simply to cause terror, deserve a nation? With each random terrorist attack, bombing, and kidnapping they are proving themselves increasingly unworthy. They can't win a military conflict with Israel, each Kasam rocket launching is nothing more that random murder, they murder civilians regardless of whether they are being oppressed by them or not. You don't want to see that because of your prejudice against Jews or against Americans and America's allies. I'm not the one who's extreme, I don't equivocate between a murderer and someone trying to degfend himself.

I believe lethal force is justifiable in self defence. You have yet to tell me how the Palestinians were defending themselves from that hapless woman, who's only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since the Palestinians can't hit any specific target with their rockets, then why do they launch them. I don't think the Palestinians are any safer from an Israeli retaliation because they killed that woman. Where has 40 years of terrorism gotten them? Gaza wa just an experiment, to see how the Palestinians would react if Israeli handed territory over to them, so far the results have been rocket attacks and kidnapping. I'm afraid the American people decided to give peace a chance when they voted in the Democrats, and because of their turning their backs on terrorism, the US will receive another terrorist attack like the one on 9/11. Congress will tie the government's hands so it can't get intelligence all in the name of privacy and civil rights of course, the US government won't be able to stop the attack and thousands of people will die, perhaps more that the total number of US soldiers that died in the Iraq War. The Media is to blame for this, because they tend to accentuate the negative, and eliminate the positive in all their reportings of George Bush, it is basically the Media's congress that got elected because of their control of war reporting coverage that gets to the American people, and so thousands and tens of thousands of Americans may die before they kick the bums out of Congress who would not protect them. This is a simular phenominon to the Omert election. Basically the purpose of the Gaza experiment was to show the true objective of the Palestinians to the World. Of course the worlds full of people like you, who reflexively hate Israeli Jews because they are allies of Americans, and that's why you call that Israeli woman and occupier, and you call her murder, "resistance".

One thing I do notice about left-wingers is their tendency to use euphanisms alot. Instead of using the word baby killing or abortion, they call it "choice". Instead of calling something a retreat, they call it a "phased withdrawal". I don't like people who use euphanisms, because I feel that they are being dishonest and that they are trying to deceive someone. Do you think if you call something a "phased withdrawal", that it is not a retreat? How stupid do you think I am? The purpose of language is to convey meaning, not to obscure it! People who butcher the English language to obscure their intentions are nothing but a bunch of moral cowards.

Did the Israelis want to kill innocent civilians, or did they kill innocent civilians as an unintended consequence of pursuing other objectives. You just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well the results are the same so they are the same." No they are not the same! When Palestinians kill innocent Israeli civilians, those civilians were their objective. If innocent civilians die, they consider their mission to be a success; if Israelis only kill innocent civilians but don't achieve their objective they consider that a mission failure.

The Palestinians use surface to surface missiles because they really aren't concerned about who in particular they kill, just so long as they kill "some Jews." This intent produces some casualities that really aren't important to their goal of an independent Palestine because those victims aren't really the ones who are oppressing them, they are just some conveinient Jews that get in the way of their rockets and bomb.

The Israelis uses air to surface missiles usually shot from helicopters of planes, they usually wait till they have a particular wanted target in their sites and then they fire that missile, if the missile hits, then it kills their target and perhaps some surrounding individuals, if it misses then in kills some other individuals without killing the main target, but the point is they are trying to kill somebody in particular rather than killing just a general category of people, and I must add, they were much more accurate than the Allies were in defeating the Axis nations during World War II.

The Israelis know all about killing a general category of people, they as Jews were victims of just that sort of exercise, or their parents and grandparents were. The Palestinians uses terrorism and missiles because that is the best they can do in killing Jews, the result is some civilians being killed. If the Israelis were intent on killing a general category of people, they wouldn't go after a specific person, and they wouldn't use air to surface missiles. The Germans taught them how this was done. The Israelis can take control of any given part of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, the Palestinians can't hold onto Israeli land, but the Israelis can hold onto that of the Palestinians, that fact means they can occupy a village and systematically kill all the Palestinians in that village while cutting off their escape, then they would move on to the next village and town and do the same. The Palestinians would do this if they could, but they can't, they'd have to defeat the IDF on the battlefield first, so all they can manage is shooting rockets into Israeli territory and then scooting before the Israeli helicopters or fighter jets can get them. What the Palestinians are trying to do is evil, while what the Israelis are doing is for self-defense. Do you honestly think the Palestinians are defending themselves when they kidnap Israeli soldiers or target nonstrategic Israelis villages without soldiers in them with their rockets and bombs? Frankly the Media's even-handed approach to all this is just plain disgusting.

I am not name calling, I am labeling the accurately by describing what they are doing to the Israeli civilians they are targeting.

The Israelis, don't need terrorist acts, they have a powerful army and are capable of overunning any part of Palestinians territory and all of it at once. If they were truly intent on doing anything evil to them, they would follow the example of Nazi Germany, not Yasir Arafat. Terrorism is a tool of desperation, and the only thing the Palestinians are capable of, they are only killing innocent victims and not their enemy and they are only making that enemy mad at them and come to hate them, but they are not damaging there enemy and they won't be acheiving their goal this way, giving them that land in Gaza only brought the appearance iof their achieving their goal, but the Israelis can take it away from them very easily, and with each terrorist attack and missile launching, the Palestinians are supplying them with the motivation to do just that. We in America support the Israelis because we find our soldiers in similar situations to that of the Israelis, we don't want to tell them how to defend themselves, when it appears we may eventually have to use the same techniques. Since your country is not involved you can play the high and mighty type who is sitting in judgement of us based solely on teh results on the ground. War is messy, and you'd know that if you participated in it.

The Israelis aren't exterminating Palestinians, I told you what they'd do if they were!

The Israelis aren't those people, they are a colony of civilized European Jews doing their best against surrounding barbarians. This appears to be the only way that democracy works in the Middle East so far, and you want to snuff this out in favor of the barbarians.

And that makes them different just like the modern Italians are different from the Pagan Romans, the culture of Ancient Rome and Modern Italy are completely different, they speak different languages and they are clearly different people, even though is is partly descended from the other. My problem is not with the Christian Arabs, they aren't the ones blowing themselves up fanatically and killing Jews. Many of the Arab Christians have allied themselves with the Israelis, especially in Lebanon. Christians, like Jews, have been oppressed by the Arab Muslims.

Yes, fortunately the European Jews have been exposed to European culture and it has improved their behavior tremedously. The Original Jews in the ancient Kingdom of Israel were probably more like the Palestinians in temperment, just ask Pontious Pilate, the Jews he governed were an unruly bunch with many fanatics, and the Romans could barely hold on. Fortunately for the Romans, the Israelis had no gunpowder or explosives, so it was just sword and shield with the occasional dagger in the back. The Jews of today are not the same Jews who gave the Romans so much trouble, they are basically European Jews with European attitides, they don't have tribes and fight endlessy like their Arab cousins do, and that is to their credit.

I think the Palestinians are probably related to the Jews they are trying to murder, I think many of them had Jews in their ancestory that were forcibly converted to Islam by the sword.

We were sort of responding to the criticism of us in employing NAZIs to run the German post World War II government during allied occupation. In Iraq, we've listend to those critics and decided for a clean sweep, that way we'd have no one with blood on their hands running the government. Too many Germans who murdered innocent Jews and conducted experiments, were still employed by the Allied Occupation Government in Germany, we decided to avoid compromises with evil, and if more people suffer for our refusal to deal with the Devil, tough! If we are to have a War on Terrorism, we assuredly cannot enlist the help of the terrorists themselves, and thats who the Syrian and Iranian governments are. In fact recently the Iranian government put its own candidate to head the Al Qaeda organization, the very same one which attacked us on 9/11, if that does not put Iran squarely in the camp of the Enemy, then I don't know what does. If Iran is involved in Al Qaeda, then it is our enemy just as assuridly as Al Qaeda is, and for the first time we can go to war against another state. We must prevent them from getting nuclear weapons in any case, and even if we do, we must take the consequences and take them out! Best get them before they have nukes. If Congress won't allow us a sustained operation, then a quick and dirty operation to destroy their government will have to suffice.

No more Mr Nice Guy then? Ok, maybe we should assume that Arabs always bite the hand that feeds them! Why should we be concerned about them then. If they are prejudiced against us, then let them kill each other until they are no more! Why should black people care about poor suffering Klu Klux Klansmen whose children are starving, I don't see why the black man should lend the poor suffering white bigot a hand if he'll only hate him for it. Now you explain to me that if the Iraqis hate us for having the wrong religion, why should we do a damn thing to help them out? Perhaps we should only be concerned for the menace that they are, and cease the help that we are offering, that is where your logic leads you doesn't it?

That is if we actually gave a damn about the Iraqis, if they hate us for helping them and they can't learn to appreciate that help, I sure don't want to help them anyway. The US does alot of good things around the World, in Indonesia for example after the tidal wave, if they can't learn to appriate our efforts and sacrifice for them, then we should stop helping them.

Two terrorist countries? Aren't you forgetting that they are the enemy?! i'd rather see the Iraqis continue to suffer from their own violence then give any advantage to these enemies of ours. I remember what the Iranians and the Syrians did to our soldiers in Lebanon, and as far as I'm concerned, so long as those governments are in power, we should not talk to them nor give anything to our enemies, we will not surrender, and if they cause us any trouble we should make a mess of their countries too just like we did with Iraq, except not sacrifice our soldiers to fix things afterwards, let them suffer, starve, die of exposure in their ruined buildings, and if they ever raise a hand against us again, we should bomb them again and again until they learn to behave themselves, all while keeping our soldiers as safe as possible and not having them walk amongst them and be vulnerable.

You know if we leave the Arabs in charge, they will only take our money and teach their children to hate Americans and Israelis, I don't want to have to pay for that.

There is no point in having a state of Iraq if it is run by our enemies in Iran and Syria, so its resources can be used to attack us. All this nice guy stuff didn't work, that is the lesson of the Iraq War, which is what your saying, your conclusions that we should rebuild Iraq anyway even though the Iranians and the Syrians will see to it that they will be our enemy makes no sense. The point of the whole exercise and why we are bothering is to enhance our security, if we reward our enemies while trying to help the Iraqis, we are losing site of our original goal of enhancing our security. If the Iranians want to do something with Iraq, they can do it on their own dime. If we are to spend our own money, it had better be to improve the world situation for us, not for some selfless exercise that our enemies will use to turn against us. We need to come to the point with our new enemies that we were at with our old, if they want to survive in this world, their had better be real two-way peace, and none of these terrorist attacks.

I figure we can do worse than let Iraq die, they are the ultimate losers if they lose their country, not George Bush. Our ultimate goal was accomplished when we removed Saddam Hussein, if any parts of Iraq cause us more trouble, then we shall stomp on them too, and no more "Mr Nice Guy" helping them back on their feet, they have shown themselves not to appreciate the gesture.

I don't know, you accuse the US Army of moving in on a community of sharecroppers and forcing them to have sex with prostitutes so they they all contract syphilis, and then building a big barber wire fence around their community and guarding it so they cannot see a doctor and get their syphilis treat and they are kept confined until they all die of the disease. Now why did the US Army do this? The commading officer just twists his waxed mustache and snarls. I guess because they are just evil and they are out their trying to help liberals like you make their point.

So the ancient Romans went into the woods to go see a prostitute and got torn to pieces. How can the Romans be so dumb not to be able to tell the difference between these two things?

1967 was the year I was born, and we haven't even walked on the Moon then, I wouldn't call that recent. How old are you anyway, 80?

Your order of events is backwards.
First Israel didn't hold that territory when it was attacked.
Second, Israel took that territory as spoils of the war that the Arabs launched against it. Israel didn't ask for this war, and the War cost the Israelis dear, so it took the land as compesation for the war it was forced to fight defending itself against the attacking Arab states.

How do you build a constituency for pulling out when the Palestinians keep on attacking when the Israelis start? The only thing the Israels see is the Palestinians keep on attacking and the Israelis have less territory. Even the French stopped attacking the Germans, when they began their pullout of France at the end or World War I. Apparently you feel that the Jews should get even worse treatment than the Germans who invaded your country, and that the Jews should pull out while under fire by the Palestinians. I wonder how far the Germans would have pulled out if French troops started firing on them as they did. How many Germans did your country shoot in the back as they were trying to leave your country? Also all of Israel can be considered a colony by your definition so basically you are saying that their can be peace if Israel ceases to exist, a nonstarter and an excuse for continued violence against Jews. Besides if you can argue that if Israel ceases to exist and their will be peace, and Israeli politiciant can just as easily argue for the Palestinians to cease to exist and their will be peace.

The Palestinians hardly fired only one shot, they dug a tunnel into Israeli territory and took hostages, and fired rocket(s) - plural at Israeli villages. These ISraeli villagers got no warning for this, they thought that Israel was finally on the path to peace with these concessions, and they should be safe from the Gaza territory at least since the Palestinians got all of that, but no, the missiles flew anyway from Gaza. If no good deed goes unpunished, then why should they be followed by more good deeds? Would your country cede territory to Spain if Spain attacks you? What if it kept on attacking your country until France gave Spain all the territory it wanted, and the World condemned France for being an obstacle to peace by refusing to yield its territory?

They are deliberately attacking civilians, which would be a warcrime if those civilians weren't Jews according to the UN.

Did many French Partisans deliberately kill German civilian women and children in order to drive the Germans out of their country? Did they target many German Schools, did they position snipers out to shoot those little tots as they left the school grounds, murdering each one of them until Hitler decided to pull out his troops? That is the sort of thing that constitutes Palestinian "Resistance" as you term it. But you prefer to keep those innocent civilian victims off in the background and call them all "Colonists", even the infants, and the school children that the Palestinians deliberately kill. i don't know what else the Palestinians are targeting when they randomly fire missiles into Israel towns, they aren't doing a damn bit of good against Israeli tanks and airplanes, that's for sure. If you believe in waging war against the civilian population, then whats to prevent the Israelis from doing a similar thing deliberately rather than accidentally as they now do it when retaliating against terrorists?

In the bible it says the Pharoe's name was Ramses, which Ramses, it was I don't know. All I know is that the Jews have their own semihistorical records in the form of the Torah, and the Egyptians have theirs in Heiroglyphics. Just as you can't expect the Jews to be completely unbaised in their accounts, you can't expect the Egyptians to be unbaised for their part either. Do you think that if the Egyptians build their pyramids or whatever with the help of their Jewish slaves, that they would admit to it in their own historical accounts?  I think not, if Jewish slaves were used, their part in the construction would have been unacknowledged and unappreciated as they were slaves after all, and would not have volunteered this labor if given a choice.

Good Point DonPanic, but that argument also applies to the ancestors of the Jews today who founded the Modern state of Israel. Past grievances committed against arabs 60 years ago, do not justify terrorist acts against Jews today, it is not old folks homes that the Palestinians are going after, they target school full of Jewish children who can't be blamed for the acts of their ancestors 60 years ago in the last century. I don't see why the present borders shouldn't be accepted as they are now, and that Palestinians shouldn't simply stop attacking civilians. Why to you insist on a return to the borders of 1948 or even earlier, and if earlier, should that mean reconstituing the British Empire? Do you want the British running the Middle East again? I think that would be nice, the Brits would get to take back Saudi Arabia, and Iraq once more, and the oil would flow freely and their would be no OPEC. Yes, I think it would be nice to reestablish the British Empire in the Middle East, what do you think?