Ian:

I appreciate you having a very wise finger on the Middle East pulse.

The hard-line neocons and international financiers who control them still hold to the illusion that Western power will defeat and subjugate Islam through military, economic, and religious means. Such folly.

In hypocritically unraveling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and secular Ba'athist/Sunni dictatorship in Iraq, as well as supporting Israel and only one side in Palestinian politics, the West is in very large part responsible for not only uniting all of Islam in jihad, while at the same time destroying the mechanisms and alliances preventing, or at least restricting, the inevitable bloody conflicts that again are erupting among the many factions of Islam, such as Sunni against Shi'ite.

I have resisted the widespread speculation that Bush is clinically insane. I have believed that the neocons have so far gotten everything they wanted, especially the total destruction of the Iraqi nation, the destabilization of the Middle East, and the weakening of the United States as a Democratic nation to further the advance of globalization.

There is evidence that, no matter what, Bush will attack Iran. I am doubtful that he will invade on the ground, however, even though troops will be shifted to the Iraqi borders with Syria and Iran to try slow down incursion from them. I do believe that Israel and the US will attack Iran in a massive air assault involving nuclear weapons which will in turn disintegrate quickly into a cataclysmic, pan-Islamic counter-attack against the West. This will reach American soil.

Perhaps all this will not happen, but I no longer believe we will stop it. Even though the Democratic Party has a majority, they do note have the two-thirds majority that can negate the neocons, nor will they impeach, dreaming that when they gain the White House in 2008, they will assume the unfettered power of the executive that Bush will leave them.

Please, Ian. Tell me I'm wrong.