Very good article, and I think that a great deal of thought went into it; I have a couple of issues though. Issue one= <<The Cold War was a battle of ideas. Iraq isn't>>
Maybe Im wrong but I count at least four different ideas on how the government should be run. The Kurds have their idea, the Shia, and the Sunni, plus Democracy.
And this part I can agree with part of it. Will have to bear with me a little bit, while I get into the remnants of the Ottoman Empire again.
<<Their motivations make them far more implacable, and even crueler, than yesteryear's ideological opponents.>>=I believe that Mustafa Kemal Attaturk ran into even crueler and larger boulders in his path to uniting and bringing modern day Turkey into the twentieth century.
His full name was Mustafa Kemal the name the Ataturk surname, meaning the father of Turks, was given to him by the Turkish people in accordance with the reforms he introduced to create a modern Turkish country.
In 1923 before he acquired the name Attaturk he started a campaign to Westernize Turkey, he did this at the expense of traditional Islamic law. His goal was to bring religion into submission to civil authority. At the time that was a handful, as at the time Turkey was run by religious Sultanates and Caliphates.he managed to abolish both between 1922 and 1924.He manage to get the education system off of the ground as well as give the women the right to vote, something that is unheard of in the Muslim world of the fundamentals that we are fighting even today. This is just a synopsis of his story, if anybody wants some heavy reading get a book on his life, he must have had leadership buy the boatload to get that ship off the ground. I can hear it now, common tree lets get to the point, OK here is my point, somewhere out there is a budding Attaturk, we may be fighting him now, but he is there somewhere. Our job is to try to identify him, and promote him, it will be hard to get him off of the ground, but it can be done. If we dont we will be entangled in that area for decades.
So I guess your wandering what the big picture of Saturn is doing here? Well it is in answer to the big bang theory,how could a big explosion cause all that Hmmm? :$
This photo released by NASA Thursday, March 1, 2007, shows an image of the planet Saturn obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007, as the planet's shadow stretches completely across the rings. The view is a mosaic of 36 images taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system. (AP Photo/NASA, JPL)
