Me, I fear that we're going to bungle this. That we'll retaliate with
the same chickenshit cruise-missiles-from-800-miles crap we always use
these days, and wreck a lot of Third World real estate for no
particular end. That we'll destroy the homes and live of innocent
civilians and create more suicide bombers in the process, without
getting the people responsible for this monstrosity. That we'll pour
billions of dollars and all our hopes into pipe dreams of safety and
isolationism.

I hope that we'll keep a clear head. That we'll find the people
responsible, and see to it that they all die. That if we go into this
on a war footing, we'll have the will to carry it through, down to the
risk of oh-so-precious American blood on foreign soil, to root out the
hateful madmen behind these actions, and topple the regimes that
support them. That we'll finally devote our time and energy and
resources into a good-faith effort to actually fix the problems in the
Middle East and elsewhere-- to remove the medieval dickheads who grind
their people down while berating us as imperialist tyrants, and try to
provide some peace, some stability, and some human fucking decency to
the people there so they'll stop throwing up one goddamn fanatic after
another.

If that means spending money, then by God, spend money. If it means
American lives will be endangered and lost, well, American lives have
been lost in the thousands while we sat on our fucking hands in New
York and Washington.

We should go to Afghanistan-- whether the Taliban were involved or
not-- and take every last servant of those repressive maniacs out,
duct-tape them to the cliff where those Buddhas stood, and see how
they stand up to mortar attacks. We should find the deep hole that
Saddam Hussein is hiding in this week, and drop bombs on it until we
crack the Earth's crust and bury him under a billion tons of molten
rock. We should bulldoze every village, town, settlement, and tin
fucking shack on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, no matter how much
money the owners sent the President's last campaign.

And then we should rebuild it all from the ground up. Every mosque,
every church, every synagogue. Every shop, house, store, and political
institution. We should build or re-build roads, and schools, and power
plants, and hospitals, and pass out hundred-dollar bills like candy
until the people there have enough education and enough of a standard
of living that they'll stop falling for the blandishments of every
frothing fanatic with a Koran and an ounce of charisma.

And when we're done with that, we should sail the Sixth Fleet to
Riyadh, and present the feudal dinks in the Gulf states with a bill
for cleaning up the squalor and hatred they've financed all these
years. Then we should pack _their_ eight-century asses off, too, and
install a halfway civilized system of government.

Yes, I know Riyadh is landlocked in a desert. We'll build a fucking
canal.

I am sick to fucking death of this whole part of the world, and their
petty hatreds and squabbles and problems, and I'm sick of us trying to
wash our hands of the whole goddamn mess. They've decided that it's
our mess, and they've by God fucked with us for long enough. If we
need to scour the Middle East to bare rock and pour ten Marshall Plans
worth of cash into the region to get some peace and fucking quiet,
then it's money well spent.

Later,
OilCan