Laurie, if you're looking for Tom to give you any calculated response to any of those questions, don't hold your breath. His tactic is generally instead to somehow paint the very notion that you'd even consider America to have any hand at all in the problems to be unpatriotic and dense.

It's clear you understand that we aren't always the good guys. Our white hats get tarnished from time to time and inflame others around the world. Some of those complaints are justified. Some are the results of incorrect indoctrination from radical clerics. You hit the nail right on the head that of all the people that hold our culture in disdain, it's only a very tiny amount of them that are willing to take up arms and even a smaller amount willing to strap explosives to their chest and go for the virgin multitude.

What these dolts don't understand is that people around the world primarily see humility, introspection, and the ability of a free country to air their dirty laundry as a pacifying trait. Yeah, there's a tiny percentage of brutal thugs that will go for advantage no matter what you do but you deal with them individually just as you do bad guys within our own citizenry.

You are also absolutely right that a large number of the "insurgents" we fight are in it because they feel their culture threatened and not because they hate America.

Let's go back to the Vietnam era. I remember the propaganda we were exposed to that we were fighting the North Vietnamese because they were these evil communists that hated our culture and wanted to spread their poison throughout America and yet, in the end, good will reappeared quickly between our country and theirs. It was actually rather stunning how fast the North Vietnamese forgave our involvement in their war considering how "evil" they were. There were no cases of NVA terrorists planting bombs in our cities or hijacking our airliners. They just seemed relieved to be able to get on with their lives and rebuild their country.

Somehow I imagine Iraq will eventually get there as well but it will evolve faster without our presence.

Art