[Sonart]

What I'm going to say is NOT because I sympathize with them or agree with their methods. I absolutely do not. It comes under the heading of...

KNOW
YOUR
ENEMY

I seem to hear comments like xelizer's all the time. Why oh why do they hate us? It's incomprehensible to them. They list off America's wonderful qualities and ask what's not to like, and conclude it's simply not possible to hate the United States and therefore these poeple must be savage barbarians just barely clinging to the human species.

Well, the fact remains, they do hate us, which is really counter productive to everything we're trying to do in Iraq and troughout the Mideast and therefore it might be helpful to actually make a serious effort to understand why that is. EVEN IF [Gasp!!] it's unflattering of the U.S.

I happen to agree completely with Giuliano. It's because we're there, because underneath everything that happens in the Mideast there's the hand of America, trying to run things in order to protect our vital interests. Not only have we invaded and installed regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're in Kuwait, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and now Pakistan, pulling strings, "corrupting" their governments against Islam.

They're embarrassed and humiliated, certainly about their powerlessness against Israel, whom we made, they're tired of us running their lives and their politics and they want us out. (Now remember what I said. I do NOT agree or symapathize with them. I just need to understand them if I'm going to defeat them.)

This is the lesson Dear Leader and the NeoCons forgot. It's not about liberation, it's about Nationalism, just like it was in Vietnam and for the Soviets in Afghanistan. Taking a place is easy. Keeping has been shown to be a bit tougher, as we ourselves taught the British.