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This is my current take on America's war with Terrorism...

The USA is currently a Global Economic Empire... unlike Roman before her which used military occupation to enforce her will, the USA uses finance and capital investment to control....military force is used as a adjunct when needed

On this front the 911 event opened the Abyss and nearly brought the system down...thus the massive response of the USA to combat Terrorist activity...

On this front the USA has prevailed and no new attack of the magnitude of 911 has reoccured...however it is noteworthhy that the recent attack in London while iniatially causing the NY Stock Exchange to drop in value in intraday trading actually closed up. That simply means that the Empire has become innered to the Jihadists efforts at least on this scale.

The Economic Empire will simply steam on...while tolerating these sporadic attacks much as a dog tolerates a flea....

On the specfic issue of Iraq....the question becomes could an insurgency which really is another name for Civil War have been averted? It's now a case of shoulda, woulda coulda.... The only thing that can be said is that a CW was almost inevitable in that the country is made up of 3 main ethnic groups which have never gotten along....The insurgency is mainly made up of indivduals who were in power and have now been ousted and a small number of foreign Jihadists...the Sunni's or Arab Muslims...The Shia Muslims which are of Persian extraction and are the majority of the population are now seeking their vengence against the Sunnis as well via political assination and death squads...The role of the USA is to assure that the place doesn't disentigrate into another Sommila...the Strategic Stakes are too high...National Security is directly threatened...instability in Iraq means instabililty in the region which spells OIL...which is the fuel of choich for the Global Economy ....which is spelled EMPIRE....

It does seem like a grave error in judgement on the part of the current administration to believe they could Democratize Iraq given that there has been no traditon of western style Democracy and the only unifying force the country has ever known is by brutal oppression of one minority facion over another...to whit the likely outcome will be a gradual bleeding out of the occupying USA military forces and that of the Iraqie population, until one faction or another imposes it's will and again clamps down on the oposition....

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