Good stuff, both of you.

I personally don't think we have any business with Israel. Germany exploited the Jews, not us. Let them pay for that problem. We shouldn't be involved.

Pack - I agree with you that the dependence of foreign oil has diminished a lot of our freedoms and have wrote about it many times on my blog. I have also offered alternatives.

Eisenhower built the Interstate system. JFK built the space program. I would love to see our generation break the dependence of foreign oil. It can be done.

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It can be done, using other fuels. But truth is, people like BinLaden will hate and want to kill us, either way. They don't like our way of life, or the God most of us worship.
People like that will come up with any excuse they can to give them the "right" to kill us. To make it the "right" thing to do, in their own minds.

How do you understand the mind of a madman?
Adolph Hitler came up with perfectly understandable reasons to wipe out the Jews, black people, and Polish people. They were lower on the evolutionary scale. Isn't that a good reason? (That was sarcasm, don't want ANYONE to think i think that's a good reason to murder) But to some, it WAS considered a good reason. But you have to think on the same level as Hitler to agree with that. And many people did just that. Just as there are those that follow Bib Laden and other nut cases around the world.

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oil is important because:

(a) it is still the cheapest mass source of energy we have. When the price of oil goes up, people start to "discover" more and more ways to substitute other stuff.

(b) if is still the cheapest mass resource for a lot of the stuff we use every day, like the plastic in the keys on your keyboard or in your packaging or in your paint or....etc etc etc. When the price of oil goes up, people start to "discover" more and more ways to substitute other stuff.

If people want to reduce dependence on foreign oil, they should be applauding every increase in price of gas. Instead, we delay the inevitable and find way after way to keep the price low.

As to the OP on why Osama bin Laden hates the USA? Because he's a small minded goon whose only "skill" is preying on the fears of people. And preaching hate is an easy way to manipulate people's fears.

Take this "thousands of years of conflict over religion" argument that Shawn highlighted. (Or is it Shaun, I apologize, no one ever told me the correct spelling). It's a great metaphor for a lot of reasons. But one reason its great is that it justifies playing the fear card.

Osama can say, "they've been doing this to us for thousand of years". The israelis can do the same thing. And Saddam. And so can Qaddafy. And so can anyone else who wants to justify their morally reprehensible behavior based on fear ot "them."

Unfortunately, it's not so. Oh, sure, there have been wars between Christians and Muslims. Lots of them. Lots of atrocities, too. But if you look close at the history of "that part of the world" since, say, 1000 A.D., what you find is that "Christian v. Muslim" is just a subset of what's happened. And even the "Christian v. Muslim" part is only sometimes about religion.

Look at why dynasties and empires rose and fell, look at why trade occured and abated, look at why assasinations and wars and all the rest happened, and you discover the striking fact that Osama bin Laden shares much of the appalling historical ignorance about geopolitics with recent American political leadership on both sides of the political aisle.

Am I saying that American politicians are 'equivalent' to bin Laden? No. But if you hear someone claiming to be a "leader" relying on "thousands of years of religious conflict" to justify their actions/proposed actions, recognize that they are speaking out of ignorance and playing on your fears.

I guess what I'm saying is that I really don't care why bin Laden thinks what he does. The real question is why do people listen to him? And how do we stop people from listening to him.

And the only answer I can come up with, and I find it appallingly depressing because as a teacher of history I know a little bit about how nigh on impossible this is, is that we need to spend our time trying to get people to recognize that what is going on is not *about* religion at all, but about being captive of our fears and our historical ignorance.

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Wade said "The real question is why do people listen to him?"
GREAT point.
Sadly, there are MANY followers, that will follow a nut case like him. We see it throughout history.

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all i know is them dam towelheads better not take over my plane when i go on vacation

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I would hope you're young then because the current generation in office has no intentions of breaking off of foreign oil. It'll take another ten to twenty years.

As far as Osama. Sometimes a mad man is just a mad man.

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Osama has his reasons and if you can bring them in a certain way, you can get quite a following.

He's not some Captain Planet villain* who's evil just for the sake of being evil.

There's some history behind this, like people have been explaining before. Israel just being founded there. Western civilization backing Israel up in just about every situation. I can imagine that he's not exactly in love with the US and Europe.

Not that I agree with what he does, obviously.

*Remember? Stealing a giant oiltanker and running it smack into a beach, just to teach the baby seals a lesson and getting their behinds whooped by Captain Planet instead of selling the damn thing.

This is exactly what I was getting at.. remove yourself from our sheltered life here and try to view it from their point of view.. we America on our own will decided to get involved in something that we had no business being in.. because of our need for the resources under the land.

Freshman year of college I was roomed in the apartment on campus with one gent from China, one from India, and a soccer player from Milwaukee.. I learned more sitting in the apartment speaking with the two gents from afar and their viewpoints of America than I could have learned in a semester of classes.. this was in the late 1990... it was eye opening just how we were viewed then.. I really wonder how different it would be now. Lets just say we, as a nation we not thought of very highly.. and it had nothing to do with we the people or what we did here.. it was exclusively foreign affairs.

Fast forward just about 16 years.. I joined this firm I work for now and had the pleasure of working with a guy from Pakistan.. he had been living here for about a decade.. he loved it here and the people. But he echoed the same view.. and he kept bringing up our Israel connections and the sacred land it is located upon.. to him the land and its history is what the hatred was based upon from their point of view. Holy land and we helped decide its fate..

I despise his actions and would have no problem ending him, even personally.. but I wonder how many thousands of innocent people we helped end for that black gold in that region.. a place we should have little say in at all.

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So....Israel has no right to be there? Who decides that?
What if somone says THEY have a "right" to "sacred land" in Mexico. Should we just stand by and let someone take it over, because it's none of our business?
When you talk to people who think they have a "right" to some piece of land that someone else lives on, what do you think they will say about someone that wants to help those that are protecting those on the land? Of course they are going to "hate" those people too.
All of it doesn't surprise me. The story hasn't changed from the days of the Bible. The Egyptions hate the Israelites. That will NEVER change.

As far as our dependence on foreign oil. You can thank the "tree huggers" that stopped all the oil drilling in the U.S. Drive across Texas sometime. You will be AMAZED at all the "dead" oil wells you will see. Fire those babies up, start drilling in Alaska, and we could supply alot of our OWN oil. Maybe not all we need, but enough to bring prices down to reasonable, and enough that IF the foreign countries tried to shut us off, that we could at least survive.
Now, we are at their mercy. Not a good place to be, in my view.

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Exactly.. and we are hated because we stepped into something that is not our fight and picked a side.

What if Russia or China were to say to us, either change the newly minted immigration law in Arizona for a abstract example or else face our armed forces.. how well do you think that would be received?

Now imagine they actually intervened there forces into the issue?

You don't think the majority of Americans would quickly hate them? You bet they would.

We had no business getting involved in that holy war that will probably never end..

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