The reality of war has meant exactly that - exploitation of the young and healthy by the weak and mature. History doesn't change overnight. The young fight the wars which the old ones create. The Middle East has been trained to hate America by generations of folks who make your torpedoman look like Voltaire.

Neoconservatives want to wage a new type of war - a war where hundreds of thousands or millions of soldiers aren't needed to win it. It want's to wage a seamless war -- a war that does not interfere with the basis of our prosperity, capitalism and consumerism. Sacrifice was the old way of waging war. We had less resources, when we warred in Indonesia or Burma against Japan our rubber suplly was seriously limited, so folks recycled, conserved and saved. Newspapers were kept and magazines. They were recycled too along with tin and scrap metals. That was the old way of waging war and it was done out of necessity.

In a post-nuclear, post-cold war era the US has the resources and technology to utterly annihilate any nation on Earth. Other nations know this. Only folks stupid enough not to care, or perhaps illiterate of what an atomic weapon is, would try to declare war against us. The Soviet Union didn't even at the height of its military power. They had leaders who were too smart to ruin their nation. The Middle East however, is not ruled by very swift folks. The region has some of the highest rates of illiteracy in the world and marriages between family members have placed genetic blocks to intellectual development.

When we war we could utterly destroy a nation. We hold back. But we do not intend to wage war like WWII, Korea or Vietnam. We have captured a tyrant and defeated an army with a handful of casualties. Because we are waging a war of liberation and not one of conquerors - we have incurred more casualties. We could just as easily start butchering insurgents left and right, "tactical-nuke" Fallujah right off the map and we would see a drop in the already low casualty count for Americans.

Unfortunately, unlike Germany and Japan, we are dealing with these limited types whose value for life isn't really that high and whose intelligence is seriously challenged. Occupying such a nation is bound to create that many more difficulties and because we are attempting to nation build, yes nation build, we are letting the weaklings pound away at our kneecaps and not knocking them across the room.

At the same time we have revealed the European corruption. Europe and the Middle East have become very close partners over the past three decades and they have consistently looked away and said in essence "Yes, these folks down there are idiots - but they are useful ones. They are our customers and supply us our workers." The US has hardly paid the region any thought at all, except as keeping Israel safe with US munitions and technology and making sure that our half-century old investment in ARAMCO was operating smoothly.

France made a mess of Algeria. Their soldiers made the Abu-Ghraib incidents appear like kids stuff. As a result they were burned. They assimilated the refugees and now France is not France but, is more properly, Fralgeria. So France watches Iraq with a jaundiced eye as well as the awareness that its citizens and population are ever-increasingly Muslim. So the comments of Chirac are almost the same sort of comment we would hear from leaders in Saudi Arabia or Jordan! Germany has exploited foreign workers for half a century. First the Italians, then the Turkish and now all the eastern nations' hordes who want a better life. Germany can't handle them all and don't give out citizenship easy so the place is like a hotel for foreign workers - many of them are Muslim. Likewise this has tainted their views and politics.

So that leaves Spain who was with us until they were driven out by fear and merry ol' England. Both have increasing Muslim populations of their own.

We have already won in Iraq. Iraq secured access to the region it was a logistical victory. Saddam hardly matters at all. We have embedded US culture in Iraq and are doing so more each day. In ten years Iraq will be unrecognizable. Nowadays in Germany one reads advertisements almost always half-written in English and with American phrases. They obsess about America. Their German heritage has been lost somewhat and co-opted by America. However now the Muslim workers have brought their culture with them as well - often one of violence (especially towards women).

War is propaganda by any other name. When enough young Iraqis can spend their time on computers and eating fast food and having healthier relationships with women --the jihad will be over. The war will be over. Rumsfeld and other neoconservatives have no desire to waste lives on a war that only needed to push the leadership out of the way so that our freedoms and consumerism can take root.

And for all the disarray, there is a huge change occurring in Iraq that goes completely unreported. The internet fascinates thousands of youths, arcades are sprouting up and a new generation of haves is being established. The Muslim faith just like Catholicism or any other religion wants to keep its stranglehold on the minds of its customers. The old men who blather on about "infidel this" and "sacred that" need new recruits but as the Americanization of Iraq continues it will create a bunch of folks who wont ever go back to the tyrannical lifestyle lived under Saddam. These folks will volunteer and sign up as new Iraqi police or want a part in the new government. They will be the Thomas Jeffersons, George Washingtons and Abraham Lincolns of the new Iraq.

Sacrifice for the US is given in blood, but reluctantly -- not freely as in done in barbaric nations whose value of life is not all that much more pervasive than is its literacy. And yes it is the young who will sacrifice the most. We're not going back to Iwo Jima with the dead piling up on the sand so fast that The neocons have just made sure that it is limited sacrifice. They wage war heavy on technology and expense and cheap on human expenditure.

Yes, the neocons want a new type of war - they are tired of sacrifice and want to use brains instead of brawn to defeat the enemy. Why do you think it is the young that jihad and die? It is because the old like life, sex, comfort and pigging out on food. As the young have more fun in their life they will no more wish to jihad than dig a ditch across Iraq. Jihad is for folks who are basically headcases for one reason or another. America needed a nation like Iraq to plant the seed of freedom, joy, education and yes - consumerism. It will spread through the Middle East and the Muslim faith will experience its first, long overdue "reformation".