I have yet to have anyone from an international site tell me, or our group, that what we are doing should be characterized as anything other than extremely welcome and long overdue.

Your nuanced example has little meaning in their black and white world. When you live in your childhood room and your mummy and daddy take care of all of your problems, everything seems like a rather simple task to be undertaken in between marathon sets of World of Warcraft.

Do you enforce your help at the point of a gun? Would you, if you felt the natives did not "see the light"?

The initial US intervention in Afghanistan resulted in many Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran returning home.

For the order of magnitude: probably the Afghan refugees returning home outnumbered the Iraqi refugees created.

e.g.,

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/AllDocsByUNID/d9fb1f92f03c0facc1256e3f003d4697

says 3 million returned home, 3 million remain (Feb 19, 2004)

(The huge US mistake was to switch attention to Iraq instead of rapidly finishing the job in Afghanistan.)

The point is that direct US intervention can have good effects.

Of course, you're going to say that refugees were created by US anti-Soviet policy in the first place. I won't argue that. Again, the point is that given where Afghanistan was in 2000, it was in a much better place in 2002, mostly attributable to the US invasion.

egocentric view of the world.

But according to ondelette, to not have the same do-gooding world view as him is racist. Not-racist people are the ones that feel the urge to meddle and pimp American Goodness while praising, apologizing for, or ignoring the massive military empire that enables it all.

Now if you really want to do something about Afghanistan get that fat ass of yours down to a recruiting station join up and get the fuck over there. They are short of troops remember?

He is doing one better, he is currently undergoing teacher training, ask him about it. In a few years he'll be heading over there, no shit. In a few YEARS. The Troops are keeping the place warm for him. He likes to have his cake and eat it to, he is going to serve the Empire's not-occupation of Afghanistan and fulfill his need for do-gooding without getting involved in the icky killing part. Then he can tell all the stupid ignorant racists out there that our meddling in Afghanistan is good, add another element to the "Great Things the US Has Done Abroad" list. Wish wish wish and maybe Ir-Af-Pak will become the next WWII, the next "Good War". But that will only happen if we win win win.

The dates for ME-4309 tell a story, Glenn.

1: Why did it take the government 3 weeks to start an autopsy? Date of Death = 4/5/04 and autopsy was 4/26/04. The other reports you show say it only takes 3 days between date of death and date of autopsy.

2: Why did it take 6 months to issue final report on this person? Date of Autopsy = 4/26/04, date of Final Report = 11/22/04. The other reports only took 3 months to issue.

If I were an auditor, I would dig at all other evidence related to ME-4309 and find the story behind this guy. There could be something else with the death of this person.

Actually, you don't know what's going on there, and you haven't been an expert on it since the 1980's. Read Steve Coll, read Ahmed Rashid, read Carlotta Gall, read the Bonn agreement, the Berlin agreement, the Tokyo donors agreement, the series of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Find out about the neighbors plus two arrangements in 2001. Read up on all the U.N. agencies that do nation building and what they do. Read up on all the NGO's operating in Afghanistan, what they do, and how long they've been there.

For that matter, read the September 18th, 2001 U.S. Authorization for the Use of Military Force. It's being enshrined as a permanent document. In it's letter, it authorizes the military to use force on two groups of people all of whom have been in Pakistan since January of 2002. So I guess that isn't the mandate the U.S. operates on there, is it? What mandate do they operate on? Do you know? I thought not. You can toss as many epithets as you like, you are devoid of factual information on this one. You've been reading diatribe instead of information.

When Judge Bates rules in court that a man has no rights based on a "theater of war", the lies of the other side, and the lies of your side, have collaborated in convincing a man with real power to deny rights to someone with no power because everyone agrees on a new definition of war, and that empowers the military to treat people badly. You, and not I, have intervened on that one.

If I were to argue the point taken up by Sinnard and Heru in the way they could if they actually believed in anything, the point would be to stop intervening in the politics of other countries and obviously stop intervening militarily.

In my opinion, that wouldn't mean that a country should or EVEN COULD at this point in history, close itself off from the rest of the world, anymore than an individual can close themselves up in their home and ignore the community around them without eventually engendering some pretty disastrous outcomes.

I think decentralization would benefit the world, but obviously that reality is a long way away without some kind of catastrophic or divine actor speeding things up. I'm not sure we'll ever get there, but obviously flushing everything down the toilet at once is not an option either.

become less ignorant than he is or gleefully rubbing his nose in the grime of his own idiocy depending on my mood. Here is one of Mr Chandler's exceedingly good and simple to understand videos:

South Tower Coming Down

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atSd7mxgsGY

In the next lesson children after we have watched the "F" letter episode of Sesame Street we will turn to our dictionaries and look up the words, "False" and the word "Flag" and see if we can't make a sentence up using those words that might apply to anything that may have happened in America in the passed few years.