A friend of mine just got back from two weeks there. He said on his daily walks from the hotel to the river Seine he noticed 3 out of 5 men were of Arabic/Northern African ethnicity. In his words "France is done.."
You have to pick and choose otherwise you are in a quagmire. Right now we are fighting/supporting 2 opossing sets of islamofascists, and in some ways bolstering each of them. Our policies at present are working best for the most dangerous of the two. We have surrender the moral high ground as far as the Shiite muslims are concerned which gives them the underlying support of the Shiite whackos and the swing vote in the region. If we stay in the middle between these two factions we will not get anywhere without excessive force which we seem very unlikely to use. Gonna have to get more obvious in our support for the Sunnis in my eyes. Which means abandon the idea of democracy in Iraq.
Zeus is not interested in any 1000 years of peace. He finds the wars between the curious little humans to be amusing. He also has trouble reigning in the lesser Gods & Titans. So my advice is go short all peace contracts or at least buy some out of the money puts!
Okay, now that Zzztroll and his 8 aliases have weighed in with the "they just want to be left alone vote," are there any others who want to speak up?
The main goal of terrorism is to terrorize the intended target. In this respect the terrorists have accomplished many things. Their actions have led to the erosion of civil liberties within our country. This is really because they have successfully exploited our weaknesses as a nation. We are very politcally correct. For example, it is not PC to target your investigations in muslim communities. So the government starts a massive spying campaign that collects the records of millions of americans. It is not considered right to racially profile, even though the overwhelming majority of terrorists share common physical traits. So we make grandmothers and nuns remove their shoes at airports even though they are obviously not terrorists. Basically, the greatest weakness we have is our inability to truely engage an enemy and defeat them. We want to defeat the enemy while trying to appease the Arab world and show that we are really just misunderstood. This half-ass policy is partly responsible for the huge mess in Iraq. We are spending huge amounts of money building hospitals, schools, etc, in order to win their hearts and minds. It is all in vain. They simply hate us.
Right, whenever your side lose the vote, you can blame all of it on Z. Although none of them are good options, in my view 12 people voted on sane options, while your prefered option is not workable. For the record, I support Israel's right to self-defense.
Professor, go back to school... And what is my "preferred option"? Where did I state what my "preferred option" is? Of course I didn't. Please stop pulling theories out of your ass and use that supposed Ph.D mind of yours... Noted for the record.