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So are you saying that we should rule and occupy Iraq for the next 12 years and run their schools for them to see that the next generation will getr a proper high school education for citizenship by American standards?

Why is Israel doing this? To stop Hezbollah from resupplying its troops thats why and UNIFIL is not stopping the rearmament of the Hezbollah. the IDF is primarily interested in preventing Hezbollah from firing more missiles into Israel and UNFIL has no mandate to stop Hezbollah from rearming and has not prevented Hezbollah from rearming. Since the Lebanese have broken their word many times, and have not stopped Hezbollah nor authorized the UN to stop Hezbollah, what do you expect the IDF to do? Their job is to protect the Israeli people, and UNIFIL's presence only serves to prevent them from doing so. UNIFIL is not protecting any Jews by being their, and if Jews aren't protected then Muslims are either. Israel is eventually going to act against Hezbollah again to protect its own citizens, and if Hezbollah is in southern Lebanon, then the Lebanese who live their are undoubtably going to suffer again. Those buildings that Hezbollah are helping to reconstruct are only going to get knocked down again by Israeli planes and bombs. The UN is not guaranteeing Israeli security, the French and the Germans are doing nothing except possibly adding some of their own soldiers to the list of future casualities in that future war they are not authorized to prevent, they just sit their as observers to watch the Hezbollah rearm and do nothing about it. The UN troops are simply passing their time down their, rotating in and out of the region until the unlucky soldiers get stationed their when Hezbollah decides to attack Israel once more and Israel responds. It is a game of Russian Roulett for those UN soldiers, the only thing they will accomplish is some of their own deaths when they get caught in the crossfire, believe me!

Well, for my part, I'm not old enough to remember the American Revolution, though I'm sure some relatives of mine took part in it.

And how are they supposed to get those rights if they are not free to choose their own government? Is some dictator supposed to give it to them out of the goodness of his heart? And why would he want to undermine his power structure by educating the peasants? If they are happy slaves to his beck and call, I think he would much rather let them be happy slaves, and if he wants more power, he'll put those slaves in Uniform and get them to invade his neighbor, this is where I have a problem with undemocratic governments, whether their population is ready for democracy or not.

So if your a dictator, you rule by keeping the masses poor, if yo9u should suddenly come upon vast oil wealth, you keep most of it to your self lest the people grow wealthy. the King of Saudi Arabia has distributed the wealth among his country and has raised their standard of living, but do they want democracy, or do they just want democracy to replace their government with another undemocratic form? I think it was a mistake to let the Iraqis choose their own constitution, since they are so uneducated and don't know any better, it would have been better to impose a "US Clone" constitution on them, and if they wanted to make amendments, let them go through the amendment process as outlined in the US Constituion.

I still believe in holding people responsible for their votes. If they vote for war as a population and they suffer and lose that war as a society, then I offer them little sympathy. I am thinking about the Palestinians here. The Israeli government till has a responsibility to protect its citizens, and its not going to stop simply because the group that is attacking them has been democratically elected. I don't understand this international outcry when supposedly innocent civilians get hurt in the Israeli retaliation after a Palestinian attack mounted by their democratically elected government. Maybe Palestinians don't understand how their democratic government is supposed to work, but the power to choose one's government still lies with the people whether they want that power or not, if they choose a bad government that wages war on its more powerful neighbor, then some of the people who did the voting are going to pay some of that price for the vote they cast. I like to impose democracy on third world peoples and hold those people responsible for the way they vote, so they have no excuses and no passing the buck to an unelected autocratic government.

I thought you implied that they were "happy slaves" who didn't want their freedom, and that they liked their oppression just fine because they didn't know any better.

Who operates these kill squads? Not American soldiers, but their fellow Arabs, and so called Muslims, they murder their own citizens because they do not like American occupation. If the Iraqi people have a problem, they should look right in the mirror and there it is.

So they are gullible fools, easily manipulated by dictators into thinking just what the dictators want them to think. So why should we suffer these fools lightly? We've explained to them what democracy was, and their own people have tried to undermine it, if their is one thing that comes out of this, its that Iraqi people aren't very patriotic, they sabotage and murder their own citizens. I think the Israelis have stumbled on the only way to make democracy work, if you are right, basically its, shove them aside and bring your own people. Why do the Arabs hate the Israelis? I think its because the Israelis have shown democracy to work in the middle east, just so long as it doesn't include too manhy Arabs, and the Arabs are caught on the outside looking in, they have seen how democracy has worked for the Israelis, and how the Israelis have created a standard of living for their citizens matched only by the Saudis, except the Israelis didn't rely on pletiful supplies of oil to do it. If the Iraqis think they are inferior creatures to the Jews and don't think democracy will work for them because they are so "stupid", then who's fault is that? Have they no pride that they will simply give up on democracy and concede that the Israeli Jews are smarter than they are?

Who's fault was it that they contracted syphilis? Did the army order them to have unprotected Sex with infected prostitutes. I think if a soldier is ordered to have sex with a strange woman, he may legally refuse. I don't think the Army can court marshal any of its soldiers for refusing orders to have sex, it is not a legal order. I think some soldiers were too quick to drop their pants at the sight of a pretty woman, or maybe even a not so pretty woman. I do not have sex just because pretty women are available and willing, I guess that's just a reflection of my values. I'm aware there is such a thing as syphilis, I was taught this in grade school, and I do not believe it to be worth contracting this disease just for a few moments pleasure. I believe in monogamous relationships within a marriage, and I was taught this in church, and that adultery was a sin. Apparently the parents of these soldiers failed to instill these values in them. That said, the officers and soldiers who performed this experiment on them should all be executed for their part in it, thats what I would do to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

I was in a dreamless sleep before. I was put under before the operated on me. The next thing I knew it was the next day, with no perception of time inbetween. Dying is probably like the first part without the second part of awakening again. Still I don't look forward to dying. People with religion can accept it better, because they believe they will awaken again after they die, but if you don't have a religion, you just believe in the dying part. I think it doesn't really matter in the end from our perspective, we just see a person die, unless we are the one who's dying. My mother died in 1995, I really didn't know how to deal with it, and I don't know what to say to a dying person, if you don't believe in a hereafter, you really don't know anything to say that would comfort them or make their remaining time on Earth any easier, that is why I think this latest scientific crusade is wrong. I don't think it really matters in the end what a dying person believes, if what he believes in is false, I think he should be allowed the comfort of his beliefs regardless of whether you scientific types believe its true or not. People die all the time in this world, maybe there is a hereafter and maybe their isn't. One thing we can do is try to make those people we know are dying as confortable as possible, and if what they believe about life after death is wrong, so be it, it harms no one. Science offers no solution for the problem of death, it can delay it for some time perhaps, but it eventually comes for us all.

It is a strange Universe we live in, it is so vast. we are born, some of us learn as much as we can about it in the pursuit of science and all the time we learn new things, but we have only a limited amount of time to enjoy this knowledge. We can speculate about what it would be like to travel to the stars, but we'll never know, that future era will belong to someone else. If the human race does not end during our lifetime, we will perhaps never know if humanity ever travels to the stars. I'd like to see a few achievements before I die. Perhaps human interplanetary exploration and settlement. Maybe I'll see commercial fusion power finally become a reality, or artificial intelligence. Maybe those artificial intelligences will be smart enough to figure out a way to prolong our lives, and maybe I'll live to see that day, and perhaps live to settle the stars too, it is just a hope. I was born in 1967, and I think I may perhaps live to 2047, so there are a few decades remaining where these breakthroughs might occur, but if it doesn't it doesn't, I'm no worse off than I am now. So I'm very careful to try to live as long as possible. If some idiot blows himself up because of a twisted religion, then I want to keep his kind as far away from me as possible, its not really racism, or cultural bias, I just don't want them interferring in my plans to live as long as possible, If I had some sort of religion, I would probably be less concerned about that, but I don't. If someone wants to believe in X,Y, and Z, and he's not harming anyone while doing so, then I'm not going to tell him he shouldn't regardless of whether I believe that belief is correct or not. The religious fanatic Jihadist is a different story, but they are not real common in Western Society, and that's the way I'd like to keep it.

I am self-aware, I don't look forward to dying. What does terrorism have to do with it? I was just explaining why people like to believe in something, because the end of their existance is too difficult to contemplate, is that so very hard for you to understand. The World of Science tells you that you are some kind of animal, like a deer in the woods that gets shot, or a squirrel or racoon that gets run over by a car. When the squirrel gets squashed by the car, its existance is over with, that's fine and easy to deal with as you don't see through the squirrel's eyes as it sees that car coming, tries to avoid it and runs right in front of one of the cars tires, its existance ends, but what is it like for the squirrel to be squashed in such a way, what is it like to cease to exist, for that question science has no answers.

You have just dehumanized the victims or random rocket attacks by Palestinians, you abstract them and call them occupiers. Don't you realize that most of them were probably born in Israel, just like I was born here in the United States. My ancestors were colonists too, they came here from Bavaria in the 1750s, no doubt they must have displace a few Indians when the settled, does that mean I'm going to take it kindly if some American Indian activist murders my cousins because they are colonists in his opinion and should not be on this continent? I think not. Any way the Jews have a greater claim to Israel than my ancestors had for settling here, at least the Jews can claim that they are returning to their ancient homeland, the one they were driven out of by the Roman Empire. There is plenty of archeological evidence to suggest that the Jews lived here for thousands of years, even under the Dome of the Rock is Harod's Temple or the remains of it. Now I don't begrudge Native Americans the right to live in my community should they so desire, even though their are very few native Americans in my neighborhood that I know about. I think the Palestinians could stand to be a little more tollerant of cultural diversity. Their religion is after all an offshoot of Judaism just like Christianity, surely they must understand the Jews historic claim to this area. The God Allah is after all a Jewish God, the Arabs didn't invent Him in 700 AD. Physically their is plenty of room for both Arab and Jew in the Israeli/Palestinian area, I see no physical reason why they both can't coexist in the same place. The reason they can't coexist is supplyied by the Palestinians and their rocket attacks on Jewish towns in Israel. I believe in peace and mutual coexistance between the peoples, and most importantly for the Palestinians to stop fighting and killing innocent civilians just because they belong to the wrong religion. I think they will find if they do that that the Israelis will have no reason to bother them.

As for how well you get along with Jews, I'm sure if you said to them what you just said here, about how the Palestinians have the right to kill their relatives because theirs is a legitimate struggle, they are not going to like you very much, and if they call you a Goim, whatever that is, should you be so surprised?

But that's not the only place that Palestinians live, they also live in Jordan, which is quite a bit larger in territory than Israel, in fact the majority of Jordanians are Palestinians. There are also Palestinians in Lebanon. The Israeli Jews however are confined to Israel and the West Bank Territory. If you pull back on that map so that Jordan and Lebanon also fall into view, then you get a better idea of where the Palestinians live. At issue is whether to wipe Israel off the map, that is what the Palestinians want, they could care less about the land, what they want most is for the Jews not to be there.

How are we supposed to influence the Israelis to agree to cease to exist, why don't you tell me that? Can I talk you French into giving up France, maybe dispersing all throughout the globe so that the French and the British can move into your homes? Do you see what I'm getting at. Your demands of what you think the Israelis should do are not reasonable, I would not ask that of you, so why should we ask that of the Israeli Jews?

How do you know they don't want democracy unless you give them the vote?
And what about their children when they come of age to vote, if their parents have voted against democracy, they have just denied their children the opportunity to vote without their consent, and some of their children may have to die to overthrow the dictator so they can exercise their right to vote just like their parents did when they voted away democracy for them. I think it is not fair for people to vote away democracy and deprive their children of the right to vote that they just exercised.

Well you are making a group judgement on them that they should not be allowed the opportunity to choose their own government. Much of what I was saying previously was a sort of Devil's argument. The first assumption I made is that the liberals are right and the Iraq War was wrong, so with that assumption, I concluded that Arabs therefore don't deserve democracy, since giving them the vote is considered immoral, and that it was wrong to remove their dictator which has terrorized them for so long.

Actually it is either one or ther other, either the people choose their own government or someone else chooses it for them. So long as democracy is in force then their is no dictator, and once a dictator gets in power their is no democracy. The dictator can be voted in, but once he's a dictator their is no more voting, maybe staged voting like in Cuba for propaganda purposes, but nothing that really matters.

India is a democracy and alot of the people their go hungry.

A lot of democracies are born of bloodshed, including your France. france did not get it right on the first try either. Maybe the French people would have been better off had they left their King in place. Surely it was not worth the death and bloodshed of all those French people to remove the King, have a reign of terror, a French Emperor a World War in the early 19th Century, the slaughter and freezing death of all those French troops in Russia, the reimposition of the French Monarchy, the rise of Napaleon III, Paris Commune Uprisings of Karl Marx and all that just to get to the 5th French Republic is it? France had a long and torturous path to democracy, so perhaps by your reasoning your people should not have tried and should have remained content to live under an absolute monarch.

The World is a mess, no two ways about it, but when has it not been?

All leaders lie, Even FDR, the US President that liberated France from German Occupation. FDR lied quite a bit, he promised to the American people that he would keep the United States out of World War II, while he fully intended to get the United States involved under some pretext, he even wrote Churchill letters to that effect while he was campaigning, that was a lie, are you complaining about that?

Don't look at me, I don't understand the European's need to be anti American and defy us. The Europeans always seem happiest when our President is having some difficulty doing his job, they don't like to see the US President out their solving the World's problems successfully, so they give him some trouble. Is it any coincidence that Jimmy Carter was very popular in Europe but that he served only one 4-year term of office as President in the United States? Europeans like US Presidents that are failures, losers and wimps, except in the case of FDR when he was pulling your fat out of the fire.

There is democracy in the Middle East and their is democracy here, sometimes one works against the other, just like it does in France. Sometimes I think France wants to be the World's only democracy judging by the number of dictators it typically deals with that are trying to undermine it. Giving refuge to the Ayatollah Khomeni didn't help the Carter Administration much either. The world would have been a much better place had the Shah managed to execute him before he foisted his Islamic Revolution on the World.

And the Arabs pay you back by burning Paris, isn't that nice.

You know, I'd rather be called a "goim" than be murdered, shot, or blown up by an Arab Muslim terrorist. Jews can think whatever they want about nonjews, it just so happens that I have plenty of Jewish friends, but Jews have not been a problem for American soldiers, they have not done the things Arab terrorists have done.

Now honestly, how many Jews have participated in the Paris Riots that you are aware of? Have any Jews burned any cars or buses for example? Do they have trouble getting along with the Police or with French Christians? Do Jews try to convert you or demand that you live according to their ways? If the worst a Jew can do is call me a Goim, I'll take that over an attempted assassination, terrorist attack, rioting or vandalism any day.

Why are you so concerned about what some Jews think of you? Who are those cartoonists and Salman Rushdie afraid of? Certainly not the Jews I think.

We've been showing the Arabs and other people in the world the way for 230 years, little good it has done them I'm afraid.

Would you allow the enemy to use space to launch ICBMs at your country and so destroy a city? If you destroy your enemy's ICBMs and warheads enroute, you are denying him the use of space for that purpose, as for retaliation, when nuclear missiles are already flying, making the enemy mad or causing him to retaliate is a moot point.

Then you must certainly agree the Israel is more tollerant of other peoples beliefs than the Islamic countries surrounding it. Perhaps the troubles with Iraq illustrate a point. To make democracy work in the Middle East, you must first displace the natives, shove them aside, and then put colonists in their place who believe in democracy and respect majority rule.

Arab countries consistently try to legislate religion, even our so called allies do that. I don't know why some leftists want to replace Israel with a more conservative Arab state, that institutuinalizes a particular religion to the detriment of other religions. I thought liberals were for the seperation of church and state. Although Israel is a Jewish state, it tollerates other religions to a much greater extent than Arab countries do. To replace Israel with an Islamic Palistine would be a giant step backwards. Conservative as I am, I am not an Islamic conservative and so my sympathies remain with Israel.

Then the problem is with that 20% that supports him. A person who supports a dictator is also one who is willing to oppress his neighbor and deny him the right to vote and participate in choosing the government. If I was a dictator supporter for example, I'd support a conservative dictator, and if you don't like him tough, and then maybe you'd support a Left Wing dictator, and instead of having an election, we'd have a civil war with both sides unwilling to support the idea of one person one voted. Saddam Hussein is a mass murderer, if 20% of the population supports a mass murderer, they should either be in jail or expelled from the country, because the existance of such people is detrimental to a functioning democracy, and if they are not willing to allow their neighbors to vote and help choose their own government, I have no sympathy for them, just round them up and send them someplace else. Those supporters are further reason to execute Saddam, because they might bust him out of jail and impose him on the rest of the 80% of the Iraqi people that do not want him. I believe in Justice, and someone who has murdered so many innocent people should not be allowed to live. If 20% rise up and riot, then they should be gotten rid of as the criminals they are, Some people consider Hitler a Martyr too, I an not interested in making any peace with them.

That 20% is a support base which might try to reinstall Saddam Hussein as dictator if given the chance, deprive that 20% of their leader, and they have one less individual to organize them. I think if they do not want to live in Iraq as equal citizens with the other 80% then they do not belong there, it is as simple as that, they are the problem, not whoever they choose to call their leader.

No, the people to blame are the Iraqis for refusing to take to the fight for their own country and to drive out the insurgents. The insurgents received too much support by traitorous Iraqis who put their own tribe ahead of their country. If the Iraqis want to destroy their own country then let them suffer the consequences, and let them find no refuge in the United States, they didn't help our soldiers when they were trying to help them, so why should we help them now. If they are not ready for democracy, they shouldn't participate in our society. the Iraqi people then become a threat to democracy in the region.

Saddam Hussein was not a good stopper for Iran's ambition, as he attacked his own. If we had to establish no-fly zones to keep him from murdering the Kurds and the Shiites, then he was not much use as a bulwark against Iran. We tried using him as such, and then he invaded Kuwait. I do not trust any dictator, and anyone who's not a friend to democracy is not a friend to the USA. So Saudi Arabia cannot be considered to be a friend. Our only allie in the region is Israel, and I say we should not abandon her for the sake of greedy Arabs with oil, as many Liberals seem to like. if it comes to a qusetion of whether Israelis get the land or some Arabs that vote in terrorists and abuse their women do, then I'd choose the side of Israel. The Free World has shrunk as Democrats took over the Congress, because along with that democratic victory, comes the victory of their old Sandinista allies in Nicaragua, the fools voted in Communist Marxist-Leninists!

On the contrary, we were given an impossible problem to solve, and therefore we did not solve it. It is not our fault that people make conditions towards its solution impossible. No matter what we did, the conclusion would have been unsatisfactory, the problem lies with the people who presented this problem, ie the Iraqi people, as it was not possible to solve the way we  were required to solve it. I say the best way to solve the violence problem would be to remove Iraqi people from the streets, take them out of their homes seperate them all from their weapons and put them into camps under guard, that way there would have been peace in Iraq since the Iraqi people would then have been rendered incapable of waging war on themselves.

Yet we had to allow their their freedom, their cars, their private spaces to stash weapons. Maybe the problems with peace wasn't Saddam Hussein so much as it was the Iraqi people? Is that the conclusion we should draw? The Germans offered us no problem in this regard.