What A Surprise

"I hear that there are a thousandfold new suicidal religious maniacs out to get us".

Once upon a time, the United States was attacked by a bunch of suicidal religious maniacs, who hijacked passenger jets and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and abortively, into a field in Pennsylvania.

The U.S. President, infamously obtuse about his lack of foreign policy smarts up until Sept. 11th, 2001, ordered attacks against the attackers' training camps in Afghanistan -- fair enough -- and then railroaded the world into the invasion of Iraq.

Many were the voices, high and low, that cried: "don't do it! You'll regret it! You're going to topple a nasty regime and find it replaced by a worse one! Or worse still, you'll topple a nasty regime -- which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks anyway -- and unleash a thousandfold new suicidal religious maniacs! And perhaps a couple of generations will be born, will blossom, then wither away, before this big, fat, but entirely preventable problem, recedes."

And yet, for someone as well informed as a U.S. President, life is full of surprisis.