Do you ever wonder why those bad guys want to attack the US so badly?
Could it be that we may have some guilt in bringing their hatred to us? Just wondering....we created havoc in Vietnam and we have introduced free trade agreements that increase poverty. We aligned ourselves with brutal dictators and dubious characters in the past (Saddam and Osama included, plus numerous Latin American generals, killers of priests and nuns) just because it served our interests.
Why arent't the "terrorist" targeting Norway, Hungary or Finland, Mexico, Brazil or Chile? Could it be that those countries' foreign policies aare not intended to hurt other peoples? or steal their resources (read oil). Aren't we the ones putting those houses to burn?

Just asking....

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Making you think twice......

Many reasons the U.S. is attacked instead of some of them other smaller countries. We are the big dogs on the playground, and as long as we are, we will be a prime target. The fact is that there will always be a country at the top, calling the shots, bossing around the other kids on the playground. If it is not the U.S., it will be someone else.
Now admittedly, we so some bad things in the world; And, not just to other countries, we also do bad things to our own citizens. All countries do. Just look at the records of any of the big players - Germany, Russia, China, etc. Countries that have not done much wrong in the world, have not done so because they are too little, like the ones on your list.
However, out of all the big players, we are the only country that gives billions in aid, fights for freedom, does much good will. Who gave 90% of the money to the tsunami victims and sent most of the rescue workers? Who gives almost all the money to aid African? Who sends money to almost every country in the world, except a few? Who has more humanitarians working around the world? We are the most charitable nation in the world, we give more than anyone else.
Also, terrorists have always existed. I promise that if the U.S. dissolved tomorrow, there would still be plenty of terrorists. Terrorists are similar to environmentalists - if you let an environmentalist win an issue(maybe outlawing fast food), they will not go home, they will simply take up a new, annoying issue. The environmentalist will get up every day and fight for some new environmental policy no matter how many times you let them win; they will not go away. Terrorists are the same. Do you honestly believe that if the U.S. suddenly left everybody alone, tomorrow they would quit being terrorists?

I would say that our army is indeed worn down, but not out. Sure, we could still defeat any other army out there, but compared to where we were at the beginning of the war in Iraq, our military is weaker than it was before.

Your premise that we are in a position of advantage by occupying Iraq is a premise that I find absurd. We were in a much better position in the Middle East right after the war in Afghanistan. At that point, we had the support of all moderate Arab countries, we had bases in friendly Arab countries like Oman (where my unit was based during the war in Afghanistan), and we had the Taliban reeling, powerless. Al Queda was also greatly weakened by our decisive action. Compare that situation to our current situation. Thousands of casualties of our best and brightest, our Army is no longer meeting its recruiting goals, most Arab countries are avoiding us, Moslem people are now much more hostile to America, and Al Queda is stronger than ever. Clearly we were better off BEFORE invading Iraq.

I'm in favor of the use of force when it is in our national interests, but the current situation is hurting us, not helping us. The real question is what do we do about it. Personally, I think the situation in Iraq has degraded into a civil war that we can not fix. We need to patch it up as best we can, and gradually withdraw our troops from that mess.

I agree with your assessment of the very real nuclear threat to the US, but I disagree with the idea of being militarily aggressive as a way of delaying that nuclear threat. That would just spread us thin and make more enemies for us. I think we need to extract ourselves from Iraq, rebuild our military back to its robust state before the invasion of Iraq, and prepare to take on Iran. Iran was the real threat to us all along. Sooner or later, we are going to have to take them out. North Korea is another real nuclear threat, but I'm hoping that they will collapse economically before long. Iran will NOT go away, they will only grow more powerful and more dangerous, until we do something about it.

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Ridicule is the last resort for a bankrupt point of view.

"our military is weaker than it was before."
I must respectfully disagree. I believe that we are more dangerous than ever. Surely, you understand that wars of the future will be fought with machines, not men. UAV technology (Predator anyone) is expanding at a rapid pace; They are being used on more frequent basis, though being controlled by human controllers. It is only a matter of a few years before we turn the decision making completely over to technology. Surveillance and Target Attack Radar Systems(TARS) are more and more advanced. The F-22 Raptor is going operational. Robots use is expanding, how about the Crusher - "Crusher represents a new class of unmanned ground combat vehicles (UGCVs) developed under the DARPA/Army UGCV-Perception for Off-Road Robots Integration (UPI) program. Crusher is a highly mobile vehicle designed from the outset to be unmanned. It is being equipped with state-of-the-art perception capabilities, and will be used to validate the key technologies necessary for an unmanned ground vehicle to perform military missions autonomously. Crusher will be equipped with representative sensing and weapons payloads for planned field experiments."
How about Sci-Fi weapons - "The technology behind space ship lasers and force fields is a lot closer to reality than many think." - http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/armyweapons/a/arscifiweapons.htm
How about accuracy? You think we hit civilians now? In WWII, we had to drop 100 bombs to ensure a hit. In Vietnam, we had to drop 50. In Iraq 1991, we had to drop 10 for every hit. Today, one bomb = one target destroyed. Amazing.
I could go on and on. The premise that our military is weaker is absurd. We ARE the most advanced fighting machine in the world and will remain so. The recruitment problems you mention, and soldier deaths, is becoming less and less problematic, not more so.
Let's see, what is the death rate in Iraq for US soldiers? After a little research, I've discovered the the death rate in GA, US is around 1000 per 100,000 per year, almost a hundred of those from firearms alone. When you take into account the statistics for the rates of murders and deaths in the US, it's not much more dangerous to be in Iraq. Of course, this assumes that you take the proper precautions in Iraq and don't just walk around. In fact, I don't think that a soldier in Iraq is in much more danger, though some more, than someone driving through Atlanta.
As for Iran, where we are in Iraq puts us in a great position to deal with them. Not to mention, it allows Iran opportunities to attack our citizens that they otherwise would not have. Not that Iran attacking soldiers is a good thing, but, politically, it could give our Congress the ammo it needs to convince Americans to do what needs to be done, which they otherwise, being stupid, don't understand. Plus, as a bonus, Iraq is a great staging point for any military action against Iran. Think about it, we have how much military muscle just miles away from them?

Gump - "Personally, I think the situation in Iraq has degraded into a civil war that we can not fix." I couldn't agree more, have no desire to fix it, and I don't believe Bush does either - he says he does entirely for political reasons. Don't get me wrong, I would throw Bush out if I could in favor of someone else. However, as I said in my previous post, I do not believe that we remain in Iraq for the reasons blathered about in the liberal media. We are there to put us in a unique position for military threat or action against the numerous hot beds in the region. Iraq is a militarily strategic position. Of course, no harm in helping out innocent people a little while we're there - bringing power online, building schools, etc. The Iranians know why we're there, that is why they are supplying weapons and actively fighting us.
As for the friendly of the moslem people, that's too much to go into here. I'll leave it with two points. If you study Islam, you will understand that Muhammad will return when, and only when, Muslims have taken control of the entire earth. Different factions in Islam do disagree with the means of accomplishing this end, militarily or politically, but they do not disagree with the necessity. Islam demands that the US eventually come under what is the English translation of the word Islam - submission. Point two, in Islam, one must earn their way to heaven; One's good deeds must outweigh the bad, this is different from Christianity, which offers salvation through grace alone. Being humans, all of us, it is a scary thing if you believe that admission into heaven depends entirely on being good. In Islam, there is only one guaranteed way to salvation - jihad, that is the reason that they find it so easy to recruit suicidal warriors. To go any further into the problems with Islam would take too long.
So, hope my answers help.

Rick, I think we agree more than disagree. We will just have to disagree about the effect that this current war is having on our military. Meanwhile, I agree with you about the unmanned vehicles, especially the Predator. One of my friends from my ABCCC days was a co-pilot who transferred to a job flying Predators. (ABCCC was a C-130 that was like AWACS without the radar; it's been retired since then.) You might think that Predators being unmanned, they don't need pilots, but actually they are being flown remotely by real pilots. When a Predator launches a weapon, the trigger is being pulled remotely by a real person. That may change at some point in the future, both for air and ground vehicles like the Crusher that you mentioned, but for now, I'd prefer that unmanned weapons do not operate completely autonomously. I read that the AF is also working on unmanned dogfighting aircraft that will be capable of pulling 20-g turns routinely, something a human pilot can not do. Imagine the gut-check you would feel if you found yourself in a dogfight against one of those planes! A robot feels no fear, no mercy, no hesitation, and no fatigue. Scary!! If we can develop similar systems for ground ops, that would be wonderful for situations like Iraq, where the enemy is willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to claim American lives. However, I fear that unmanned ground vehicles will NOT be able to distinguish between a friendly Arab versus an unfriendly Arab, since our highly trained soldiers are having the same problem.

You can say that all Muslims want to take control of the world, but we DO have friendly Arabs. Just look at Turkey, for example. I can personally vouch for the Turkish people being mostly pro-American--I was there for several deployments. They were friendly and pro-American on an individual level, not just the government. Now, in Saudi Arabia, the government is pro-American, but the man on the street doesn't really like us. Many of them actively hate us. But not all Arab countries or Muslim countries are the same. So let's don't make the friendly ones into enemies!

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Ridicule is the last resort for a bankrupt point of view.

However, as scary as unmanned, computer driven(not man driven) weapons are, they are coming. Computer technology is becoming better and better at differentiating between threats and non-threats, will probably eventually be able to make that determination faster and more accurately than any human. I've heard it estimated that within fifty years, one computer could be more powerful than all human minds combined; That's probably stretching it, but they are getting scary.
I am not saying that there aren't friendly Muslims, there are friendly communists. Friendliness is good, but a friendly ruler is still a ruler. In Islam, there is no separation of church and state; Islam is the state, is the government. Islam demands that ALL governments and ALL people come under submission to Islam. There are many Muslims that believe in a peaceful takeover of the U.S - by growing their numbers through high birth levels and immigration, eventually taking over government, similar to what's happening in Europe right now (Europe is in a more advanced takeover stage than the U.S. is). No matter how friendly they are, they can NOT allow any government or people to continue to exist without eventually submitting to their religion, to do so would mean that their prophet would never come back and that their religion is wrong. Islam IS the fastest growing religion in the world, around 100 million strong right now, and if you want to know what the U.S will eventually be like if we don't recognize the eventual danger, just study the nations where Islam is already dominant. Saudi Arabia may be friendly to the U.S., but try going over there and preaching Christianity, see how long you live. Take your wife and children over there and walk around the streets in clothing unsuited to their religion. Show me one single country where Muslims are in the majority and there is freedom. No matter how friendly, Islam is counter to freedom.

Which is why the U.S. is fortunate to have immigrants that come mostly from Mexico and Latin America, good catholics with family values and mostly conservative views, firmly opposed to Islam. In fact, Latin immigrants are closer to conservatism than liberalism. When they become citizens they vote mostly Democrat, though, because of the stupid approach to immigration by Republican pundits and conservative talking heads.

This is something I don't a lot about, but I'll ask any way.

Is there any advantage to being in Iraq if we have to do something in Iran?

About So. Korea -- "Kim Jong-il's Health Spurs Successor Talk"

If we had done Iraq "right", meaning we had gone in with a realistic plan for occupation, and about 300,000 troops like General Shinseki had recommended before the war, then Iraq would now be stabilized, and an excellent staging area for a conflict with Iran. At least, that's my opinion.

But the current situation in Iraq is so unstable that we can't even keep the Green Zone from getting rocket attacks. Our presence there is steadily draining our military and our national economy. Speaking in financial terms, Iraq is a liability, not an asset. We need to cut our losses, like Daimler-Benz selling off Chrysler.

My expertise in the military was in directing and managing air operations, day-to-day, and not in strategic planning, so all this is just my opinion.

....wishful thinking.
As for only using companies that do not hire illegals, well, that'll be difficult to judge. Illegals probably built your house, clean your home, mow your lawn and the golf course where you play, read your water meter, pick up the vegetables you buy at the grocery store, wait on you at the Mexican restaurant (or any other restaurant), nanny your kids, take care of your elderly parents, fight in Iraq to protect your freedoms, do your wife's nails, etc, etc

First and foremost, unless your contract with the company says you can break the contract for hiring illegal aliens to do the work, you could end up getting sued if you breach for that reason. So, before you launch into that course of action, you'll have to take some proactive steps of your own.

Second, although bloggers here seem inordinately focused on illegal aliens from Mexico and Central and South America, some illegal aliens speak english. Yes, that's right. There are some who come from countries where they learned english. So, you'll have to change how you go about determining who is and who isn't an illegal alien. Language skills only tell you the country of origin.

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If you and I are always in agreement, one of us is likely armed and dangerous.