16. Do you have particularly strong feelings about the war in Iraq? If yes: Please explain those feelings.

Because I think he really doesn't care about the war in Iraq. Once it became clear we weren't going to have an easy win, the man seemed to lose interest in the subject.

...or whatever else you're passing out to the losers.

I believe that all speculations on 2008 are meaningless at this point. Everything depends on what happens in Iraq. There is also a risk of a recession or worse.

George Bush, you see, isn't done fucking things up.

...as to why we invaded Iraq:

"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them."

This isn't realism and it's more than just delusionary: it's racism, pure and simple.

He's balling up all the people in the Middle East and saying that they are the same as the terrorists: "they" (the terrorists), he says, want to humilate us, thus we need to humilate "them" (people in Iraq who had no connection to the terrorists). Note the conflation?

We no more 'humilated' the terrorists by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam than the mafia would be humilated or stopped by the invasion of Italy and the deposition of the Pope. In fact, the terrorists who hit us on 9/11 had even less connection to Iraq than the mafia has to Italy.

Racism is what lies behind the insane theory of the "demonstation model." The basic idea is that all the brown people (unlike white people) are connected by invisible strings and tom-tom drums and that they are all cowards who will slink away at the slightest sign of strength: so that if you lynch one brown person here, all the brown people over there will take note and behave in the desired manner; that is, they won't mess with Texas or with white women.

And by the same logic, if you want to control the behavior of a few terrorsts that you can't catch, than it makes just as sense to simply invade a whole other country where they're not even located, as long as that country shares a similar race and religion as the terrorists. IOW, we've now killed upwards of 100,000 people in an attempt to control the behavior of ten or maybe a hundred. That is what the "demonstration model" is about.

...the people on the left who like to stupidly bleat that the war is 'really about oil'--in spite of all available evidence, such as seen in this article--are only providing cover for an incompetent adminstration. The adminstration is not securing our oil supply, they are putting our oil supply in jeopardy. They are not making us safer, they are making us less safe. They are not shrewed calculators of reality, they are more like children out of control.

...has little or nothing to do with the war.

If all the US wanted was the Iraqi oil, all they had to do was sign a treaty with Saddam. He keeps the country stable (through repression), we get the oil. That's how that works--get it?

All you are doing when you claim the US is fighting for oil is giving an incompetent administration cover for their stupidity. You are claiming that they actually know what they are doing, when, in fact, they are not even competent enough to steal for us.

...anything that's done will either raise prices or lower them, thus any event can be used to 'explain' anything. But it's not true. The simpliest way to 'get oil' is to sign with a dictator, as in Saudi Arabia, where the oil is also 'nationalized.'

Oil companies want to make money, not war (or love). When the first Bush stopped the first Gulf War and refused to take out Saddam, that may well have been the influence of the oil compainies. They would rather all the fighting stopped so that they could ship and sell oil. But that was influence in a pacifist direction, so the senile left ignored it.

We invaded for exactly the dumbshit reasons put forth by Henry Kissinger and others: that we needed to 'humilate' them before they humilated us. That we needed to put up a 'demonstration model' to make brown Islamic people go, "ooo--mustn't mess with Texas." That we needed to 'show strength' and prove that America is not 'weak.' They also wanted to prove their various theories such as that torture works and that a president with no restraints is more effective than a president with restraints and that a war can be fought without raising taxes.

The people in the Bush administration are not grownups. They are not rationalists. They do not even have the simple competence of theives and thugs. They are idealists and dipshits and blowhards and politicians and fortunate sons and they have more to do with tv pundit thinking than with realistic thinking.