[jamesnmlaw]

I was not a soldier so my opinion on the matter may be worth nothing. My father was a 19 year old AF Sgt. on a B29 in Korea. My father'd talk about war maybe for a minute or so every 10 years and I learned that war was a private thing for him, that war was an ugly and frightening thing and if you were in a war the war stayed with you deep inside forever and you changed. I thank God I never had to experience war (too young for Viet Nam and too old for GW1) but I wonder a lot how I would have done and how I would have changed.

I don't want anymore of our people to die in Iraq.

72 million people died in WW2 before Germany and Japan were so defeated that their people had nothing to fight with and nothing to fight for. A post-war threat to Germany and Japan was identified (USSR) and an offer was made to the Germans and the Japanese that they couldn't refuse: we'll help you be like us or they'll make you be like them. Now, I drive a German car and am using a Japanese computer.

We shocked and awed the Iraqi army into surrender. We captured the head monkeys in charge and we killed them. We put our monkeys in charge and hopefully our monkeys got the message that they have to do what we say or we'll kill them as well. But, we never defeated the Iraqi people and their will to fight and that's what we're fighting today. We haven't given the Iraqi people an offer they couldn't refuse.

Let's leave now this mess now. We can always go back later if the monkeys we put in charge start throwing poop out of the cage.

Today's confusing statistic: over 700 Allied servicemen were killed in peace-time Germany between May 8, 1945, and December 31, 1947.