Dwayne, what you wrote is the polar opposite of Roy -- you make a coherent argument, relying on facts, analysis, and reason. What Roy does is emotional spray. If what you wrote and what Roy writes were to come into physical contact, they would be mutually annihilate in an explosion of gamma rays.
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Ha!
Any mention of gamma rays brightens my day or would, if gamma was visible to the eye.
My own, modest efforts aside, I'm fascinated by the mileage we've gotten out of the pressing question of Roy: for or against.
And of course you're right to say my sketch of a plan (which borrows heavily from what non hysterical military wonks were proposing in '01) had a sub-zero chance - considering Washington's current, de-evolutionary political condition - of being put into action.
Leaving the ever-popular Nazi analogies behind, I think the situation was not unlike a crime victim depending upon a violent and untrustworthy rescuer to deliver him from dire straits.
Perhaps a Clinton, or an Eisenhower or, reaching much farther back, an Augustus would have handled the situation with more villainous aplomb. But, as you say, "unfortunately" we were all placed in the impossible spot (and that "we" included, most immediately, the Afghan people and her neighboring countries) of turning for aid to an addled and distracted bunch - mentally hobbled by arrogance, lack of expertise and an unhidden agenda: the invasion of Iraq.
.d.
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Quantum mechanics is the coolest thing ever invented, ever.
Sean Carrol, physicist