I’m personally more worried about China. With the number of Chinese spies recently prosecuted in the US, their increased jingoism and their skewed male/female ratio, I think it’s a recipe for disaster.

I’ll have to scrounge up the article, but someone noted that with a restless young male population that have no prospects for marriage one of the few ways that China can proceed to harness that youthful “energy” is to go to war with somebody (perhaps somewhat akin to the British second son syndrome in India).

As for Bush and company, I guess I did call it BS when it happened. I studied military history with Ted Rope at Duke and studied WWII in France at the Normandy Beaches. There was classic military propaganda techniques employed on our civilian population. Look at Cheney’s set of interviews pre-war. I remember my friends yelling at me when I dismissed the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman heroics as fabrications. My comment was there was no way that these stories about their bravery can be confirmed in such a short amount of time. Ergo, the stories are false. Sadly enough, I was proven right.

As for Iraq reconstruction, just a review of history indicated that the chances for success were going to be limited even if we planned for it.

I consider myself well-read and moderately well-traveled but nothing special and I guess I am just shocked at how our political leaders could get it wrong on so many fronts that seemed so obvious to me.