None of the 19 was an Iraqi. I believe that none were Afghans either. Almost all were Saudis. All of the pilots, I believe, trained in the US. That would, of course, make the US our retaliatory target of choice for the same reasons we chose to attack Afghanistan. Only Bush seems to know what the reasons were for attacking Iraq since Saddam was actively opposing Al Qaida.

Our people die in Iraq because we choose to keep them there. And we choose to keep them there, as near as I can tell, because there is a lot of oil there, which we had been buying for years until we embargoed it (at least according to the cover stories), and which we could have continued to buy without a war.

People dance in the street for all sorts of reasons. I hope our foreign policy doesn't include waging war with people who dance in the streets. If it does then, once again, we would have a justification for attacking the US.

I suggested, here in Slate, that it might be reasonable to use Agent Orange, or some similar agent, to destroy the Afghan opium poppy crops. That seems to be going against US policy which pretty much ignores the opium as it provides sustenance for the Afghanis and only kills US citizens who are so foolish as to buy it - which is, of course, punished here.

There are no good people in the world, if you get right down to it. That should probably be obvious to us when we consider that our eyes are placed for binary vision and our canines are sharp and project above the other teeth somewhat. Maybe the best we can ever hope to do is to just stay away from each other.