Veritas: Thank you. I remember reading a book on the German Army in WWI, and reading that they marched into battle with belt buckles that read “Gott mit uns” (God is with us).

I served with NCOs who were products of Vietnam and they were fervently convinced that the most brutal soldier was your average middle class American 19 year old.

We are a very violent, warlike country and do a great job covering that fact up. Like I said, I wish I had something more compelling to say in terms of what we should do, but, in truth, I don’t know.

I do know that I remember watching the footage of what they did to Daniel Pearl and thinking that just dropping a couple of 50 megaton nukes on selected targets in the Muslim world didn’t seem like a bad idea. A buddy of mine in Baghdad told me he misses the Soviets and the good old, bad old days of the Cold War. He said the world seemed a lot simpler and a lot less dangerous than it is now.