The Bush administration

[Aileron]

But Astro, Bush has never done anything to infringe upon the first amendment. Indeed there are plenty of people excercising their right to free speech and using it to criticise Bush, and other than the NSA wiretapping he's in the clear as far as criminal rights are concerned because the Bill of Rights applies to US citizens and all those "prisoner abuse" things would fall under the Geneva Conventions.

 

 

 

It has been a war struck land, and indeed it would take many years for us to create peace even if we were much more ruthless on the subject than we are. What's worse is that Iraq is only a piece of a much larger problem, as virtually the entire Middle East is like that.

 

Historically, most of the smarter empires would just say no to trying to do anything to the area, aside from the Mongols who just had the strategy of just killing everyone strong enough to participate in violence. Indeed, were it not for a second problem messing with Middle Eastern politics would be a very stupid decision.

 

That second problem is globalization. While some say "oil", its really much bigger than that. Communication and Transportation technology is increasing the range of regional conflicts and the development of new weaponry leaves potential for devastation even upon those who do not wish to participate in the fighting. In the future, the world will not have the luxery of standing on the sidelines of regional conflicts. In the future, every nation must be at peace, every conflict settled, and every tyranny toppled, or those little regional wars will bring devestation on the whole Earth.

 

You think the fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites is bad now? Imagine how bad it will be when both sides get access to nukes and start lobbing them at each other. They are already using the new communications technology to execute pinpoint attacks and using the new transportation technology to bring in scores of weapons and reinforcements in from foreign countries to aid their local regional civil wars. That war has been going on for a millenia and will continue to go on until some outside group steps in and stops them.

 

This war in Iraq is long and bloody, and worse yet is that when we are done with Iraq we are probably in store for three or for more wars just like it. The worst part is though that we can't back down though, because if we did back down and let these regional conflicts continue and these local tyrants rule, then due to technology those conflicts will affect the larger world more and more.

 

We are in the same situation as the lobster in a pot that's slowly boiling. The region outside the pot is painfull while the region inside the pot seems comfortable. However, due to slowly changing cir!@#$%^&*stances it is infact the region outside the pot which is less hazardous.

 

11______ If Bush is anything, he's a genius. Maybe a little bit of an evil genius, but definately a genius. His supposed stupidity is more of an act than anything. As PoLiX just pointed out, his family coldly and systematically took over several towns, as well as held controll of the federal government for 6 years. The "howdie boy" personality, the misuse of the english language, and all of it is in place so that people think that they are a bunch of simple friendly folk and underestimate them.