Interactions are mutual. Drugs interact, even though one may overpower the other, as do people. The fact that you had to make this point thrice, and that you had to clarify that Europe is the exact opposite of the libertarian coda, should define how much energy you continue to put into this interaction.

The other part of what I believe, which I couldn't put in because of the word limit, was the thing that ties the two responses (to you and to Amity) together. In a world of 7 billion people and increasingly large democracies, I don't believe in the right of the electorate to be ignorant. If you're capable of being informed, I think you have an obligation to do so. I didn't think that when I was younger, but you can see how it follows from what Amity wrote, that both the press and the people are needed to ensure that important things get a "conversation".

i was gonna respond to omooex's misapprehension and explain that when I referred to freespending non-middle-easterners who were financing Al Qaida (an entity with no business plan, you might say), I wasn't referring to the Pakistanis, but your breakdown pretty much covers it.

but you don't produce any do you? Has this got any thing to do with why you have gone all shy?

Remember that White Paper Colin Powell promised linking bin Laden to 9/11?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1410619

You know, I am beginning to believe that some of my friends on the left don't believe in the golden rule as a basis for morality and human interaction. I know that most of my friends on the right do not; but it surprises me to find that many here think that a foreign people will love to see an invader as long as his soldiers wear the American Uniform.

Hmmmmm. Another reason the UN should get out of Afghanistan also. :-)

And with this, I am done unless someone has a question. I mean a man either knows you don't brutalize others who have done you no harm or they don't --- how much can we talk about it in one day? No, wait ... Is this a remake of Clockwork Orange? Oh, shit.

In your model, no one has agency but Americans. I find that hard to believe. No doubt that the US was responsible for the seeds of Al Q aeda, but you can't lay the blame there forever. That's a constant source of annoyance to me, the idea that once the CIA becomes involved in something, that it belongs to the CIA forever. They may have lit the fire, but it went its own way, and it did that with infusions of cash from Middle Eastern elites. I mean, the very concept of blowback is that things come back to haunt the US AFTER the US has already moved on from that policy paradigm. That's excactly what happened with Al Qaeda.

If you have covered these topics then forgive me for my ignorance.

He hasn't and he won't. Instead he'll either tell you to that you are not up to his level and need to "read more", or he'll call you a fascist racist, but he'll never engage an argument unless it is framed as "What good can I do about X", or "What are ondelette's big ideas about Y", then he'll be more than happy to tell you all about his top-down authoritarian intervention fantasies.

After that it's back to cheering for the Imperial Agenda in Pipelanistan, for Humanitarian, do-gooder reasons of course. You see, if only the Military would step aside and let ondelette's humanitarian super brain take over, we'd have world peace, an accountable and highly interventionist but benevolent global government, a centrally planned and highly regulated economy (regulated by him) that only produces sustainable products, no economy (he destroyed it to save it), mandatory public education of all citizens over the age of three (ignorance is not a right), bicycles for all (save the planet), and eugenics programs to control the population (his superbrain dictates who you fuck and how often).

You know, utopia.

The U.N.'s relationship to the Bonn agreement is that Lakhdar Brahimi convened it, and was the U.N. specialist on Afghanistan, and that the Security Council blessed the use of troops for it.

The Bonn Agreement and Donor's Conferences included development for Afghanistan initially because the European and other powers were worried that the Bush administration would do absolutely nothing about the place, which was regarded as a failed state (state that cannot reconstruct itself - i.e. a country in a perpetual state of internecine warfare).

The U.N.'s relationship to the development itself is that of all the governments or NGO's in there, their pieces were the most consistently successful and well planned.

The peacekeeping mission there is NATO based, not U.N. based because of the Bush administration (and other governments) who refused to do the blue helmet thing.

By the way, if you look really carefully at what I wrote, you will notice that I don't think the U.S. has a right to imprison, or have the Afghans imprison by proxy, anyone there for the 'duration of conflict' under the Geneva Conventions. NATO might or might not have that right, but the AUMF doesn't give the U.S. that right in Afghanistan at all, IMHO, and by extension, in Guantanamo for the majority of prisoners there.

[And since someone has put it up]: A property of a dynamical system is generic iff it is true on a countable intersection of open dense sets in a space of Baire category 2. It usually corresponds to 'typical behavior' and has large, if not full measure, but need not, as in the case of Arnold horns with Andronov-Hopf bifurcations or saddle-node/saddle-center systems. Consequently, in many cases it corresponds with 'almost always', as in true with probability 1. It is the case that compact dynamical systems with two or more degrees of freedom are generically chaotic. The notion of praying to Ed Lorenz, even now that he's shuffled off the mortal coil, is quite a funny mental image. Does he get to talk back?