"Bush’s problem wasn’t in attacking Iraq;"

Yes it was. Especially using 9/11 as a bogus pretext. The it was the "right move but executed poorly line" along with your previous pre-invasion stuff seems somewhat revisionist and a bit of hindsight bias. This has a very predictable disaster.

See, all you have to do is make repititive blanket statements about Islam and Muslims and pretend that they are one in the same and all the same and fantasize that they all want to kill you. Nice and easy. No fuss no muss no thinking going on. Just like Shrub.

Actually, we're in agreement except that I think US attacking/invading Iraq was a problem regardless of the incompetence of the planning.

"Now I said "hold a culture responsible" before. Not genocide. That is a big jump. What I meant was more along the lines of identifying cultures with aggressive and dangerous ideologies and not being nearly so tolerant of them. After all, they want to kill us!"

Ya know, it would almost be funny....we are currently an occupying force in a country that didn't attack us and have, actually not wanted to, killed!! tens of thousands of their people and here we sit in our comfortable hysteria talking about not being tolerant of cultures with "aggressive and dangerous ideologies" and leisurely splitting hairs between the terms innocents and civilians.

Should read:

"Ya know, it would almost be funny....we are currently an occupying force in a country that didn't attack us and have, actually, not just wanted to, killed!! tens of thousands of their people and here we sit in our comfortable hysteria talking about not being tolerant of cultures with "aggressive and dangerous ideologies" and leisurely splitting hairs between the terms innocents and civilians."

Actually, "Golden Boy the polite bigot" would be more accurate. That fact, along with your repetitive strawmen, makes your call for rational debate rather amusing.

From Yahoo:

"CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was "deeply sorry" about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that didn't reflect his personal opinion. "These (words) were in fact a quotation from a Medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought," Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace outside Rome."

"...nun's murders do."

You need to stop that fear mongering nonsense. Although the sudden concern about violence in Somalia is touching, the head of the Somalian investigation into the matter stressed that his comment, which you are trying to reference, was at best speculation.

"I notice Arabs don't provoke communist China. That's because the communist Chinese government is even more vicious and hard than the Russian one."

That's utterly uninformed silliness. Compared to the US and other Western Christian societies, the Chinese have been and are barely involved in Middle Eastern Arab affairs except for the occasional business deal and as sometimes supporters of Iran.

It's amazing how we think we are the center of the universe. If we don't know about it, then it didn't happen. It's fear mongering because you are largely uninformed. For example, as I said before the reason behind the nun's murder is undetermined but yet you have taken it to be part of Muslim violence in reaction to....

You think that Muslims, or more accurately Arab Muslims, can't take criticism because some of them protest and riot when crtiticized by state actors and you call for moderate Muslims to denounce them like moderate Christians have occasionally denounced various radical Christians.

If you took five minutes to look it up, you'd realize some Muslims, particularly here and Western Euorope, have been critical of the actions of other Muslims and have consistently called for calm and dialogue. Who said Islam can't be criticized? That's your strawman. If Muslims rioted everytime Isalm was criticized here or elsewhere these carzy days they would be in a constant state of riot. Also, you don't see a defense or an apology here. What you do see is an occasional response to the rather sad anti-Arab bigotry that's trying to pass itself off as criticism of Islam.

It's amazing how when it comes to certain things these days arguments get suspiciously simplistic. In this particular case re the Pope's statement, some Muslims rioted, some held protest demonstrations, some Muslim organizations issued statements and most Muslims have done nothing at all but all you see are "rioting Muslims who can't handle criticism of Islam" and you demand that other Muslims not just criticize them (your wishy washy) but criticize them to your satisfaction.

Anyway, all of this chatter about Islam and Muslims is just a smokescreen to cover anti-Arab prejudice. Although it would be plainer and more honest if some simply said, Archie Bunker style, that they hated those damn towel-headed camel jockey sand ni**er Arabs, we get this tiresome intellectual posturing about Islam and Muslims where we lump them all together into one homogeneous mass so that we can cherrypick events like a TV show in Egypt or a protest in Pakistan or a speech in Tehran and pretend that they are representative of the whole.

In fact, we don't care about terrorism in general. Further, we don't care about terrorists acts committed by Muslims in general. Chechynian rebels could bomb Moscow tomorrow and we'd barely notice and then there's the daily attacks between the sects in Iraq that we also could care less about and so on. What we do care about are the terrorists acts committed by extermist Arab Muslims against Western targets. There's nothing particularly wrong with self-interest but let's not pretend that it's more than that.

So, I see you took my suggestion and looked up some criticism. Glad you found some you liked... :-)

When I read posts like the last two long winded repitions of the standard pro-Israel propaganda, it kind of makes he smile in a comforting way. It's like ole reliable. Plug and play or rinse wash, repeat.