What would attempting to engage rational give and take in this environment accomplish? Most posts seem to be centered around hate-mongering, cut & paste propaganda, rabid nationalism, and even religion; it's emotionalism to the nth. One is either with em' or agin em,' a hawk or a liberal, an true American or a traitor; there seems no middle ground: more of an implosion of fanaticism. I was around too back in the Vietnam era, just for a comparison basis. It was the same way then. The nation was divided between people who felt the war was immoral because it was based on false premises, and those who felt inflamed to prosecute the war with extreme prejudice; the ones who actually ended up eating the majority of the sh*t were the service men and women, if I recall correctly. Who ends up being 'right' or 'wrong' about the current war will all come out in the wash ; not by any single nation or commercial interest, but by a complex of them: certainly not by cigar chatroom posts. And things have a way of changing over time, they always do; conditions change, feelings change: certainty is more of an expectation than an objectively existing state. The lovely little war called Vietnam is over, and who won or lost is no longer contingent on people's opinions, but can be looked up in history books. The way things stand now, what would this or that fact, or reason accomplish? Things are far too emotional at this juncture. Probably by next spring, after the U.S. and Iraqi elections, people's hormones will settle down and we'll be in a better position to assess where things might be headed, or maybe not.
