I suspect we are not that far apart on what we would like to happen in Iraq. Just I have no hope it will happen.

I agree pretty much on your assessment and the solutions. Asteroids and Mars are far from being junk if those looking for resources don't worry about distance. Little NASA does in space requires a rush on materials and some businesses do not depend on getting raw materials there yesterday. The general argument for the Moon as a source of resource is it proximity to Earth.

Let us pretend the EML-1 gas station concept is sensible for a minute. Generally the econo-moonbats want to extract Oxygen from Lunar regolith and ship it to a spacecraft in orbit which has the Hydrogen to burn...

Mars has water in it's atmosphere (.003%) and that can be extracted using a stationary robotic lander with pumps and zeolite. No draglines and digging, no high temperature heating of dirt and no storage of cryogenic oxygen to be ferried to a spacecraft in orbit persumadly by another spacecraft. The only rational argument I have heard against this is demand would be greater than predicted. At some point in the far future that might be true. But the simplier and easier to implement system would be the Mars extraction process not the Lunar extraction process.