Pat Buchanan rails against the war, charges President lied

[hillbilly]

I just saw a debate on TV with Pat Buchanan about five minutes ago.

He was railing against the war. He kept charging that the President was fighting the wrong enemy.

He repeatedly said that the President lied to get us into the secondary war, which distracted us from fighting the people who actually attacked us.

Of course, the war Buchanan was railing against was WWII and the President who lied us into war was FDR and the illegal war against the people who did not attack us was against Nazi Germany in Europe and Africa.

It was "History in Dispute" on the History Channel.


And of course, the other man in the debate kept gutting and skinning Buchanan's argument like it was a big old catfish. And unlike Buchanan, he didn't have to resort to shouting and screaming and wild gestures to make his point.

In fact, Buchanan looked rather like he was late into a passionate speech given before a packed soccer stadium near Nuremburg.

But I was struck by the similarities of the arguments to today's situation. Exactly the same arguments made and countered.

Only subsitute Afghanistan and Iraq for Japan and Germany.

hillbilly

 

[rich2u]

Buchanan is a nut case. he's as bad as the loons on the left.

 

[7.62FullMetalJacket]

There have always been people on the right side and the wrong side. Only history will tell.

But with hindsight, unless it was an exercise, Buchanan should know better. Then again, he is an isolationist.

 

[agricola]

if true, Buchanan is an idiot - FDR didnt "lie the US into WW2" because Hitler saved him the trouble by declaring war on the US.

 

[hillbilly]

Buchanan did say FDR lied us into war.

He kept railing about how FDR's speech right after Pearl Harbor never once mentioned Germany.

He kept shouting that FDR did not mention Germany because FDR knew that public opinion in the US would not allow for a war against Germany and so he had to distract the US public from the fact that America was going to go to war against Germany as well as Japan.

Later in the program, he tried to make the argument that the real enemy we should have been fighting was the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.

hillbilly

 

[Diamondback]

Any wonder why the Republicn Party disowns him ???????????
What I wouldn't give to see a Pat Buchanan v Micheal Moore debate.

 

[ninenot]

Agricola, I think your history is cockeyed.

In fact, Roosevelt DID "lie us into war," after he had campaigned (like Wilson) on keeping us OUT of the war.

Roosevelt was jacking with Japan and forced them to attack Pearl by cutting off their supplies of rubber and petroleum. He was aware that Pearl was going to be hit, but did NOT pass on the info to the Pearl commander.

AFter the attack, Roosevelt declared war--and ONLY THEN did Germany declare war on the US.

And BTW, I think Buchanan is wrong regarding fighting the Nazis--we should have. We also should have rolled right through (as Patton thought) and blew off Stalin. But Roosevelt's administration was so full of Russian spies and double-agents (who Roosevelt picked) that the stupid SOB didn't know any better.

Ask any Czech about Stalin and his boyzzz. Patton was right, and PJB is half-right.

By the way, it would be really nice if GWB could come up with a consistent story on why we did Iraq. First it was the weapons. Then it was the terrorists. Now it's "planting Democracy." What will it be in 12 months?

 

[agricola]

ninenot,

the "FDR knew about Pearl" theory was pretty much demolished here last week, it doesnt hold any more water than the "Bush/Clinton knew about 9/11" theories, for the same reason (because its b***ocks).

FDR behaved towards Japan in the way that he did because the Japanese were engaged in a genocidal war against the Chinese, a war that featured unimagined (and almost forgotten) atrocities that challenge anything the Nazis (or, for that matter, the Soviets) were capable of.

Oh, and if they had listened to Patton, you would have lost - the Red Army had more men, more and better tanks and tank organization, better generals who had more experience against the cream of the German Army and two thousand miles of operational space to play in. You would also have been alone, because the Commonwealth forces would have left you to it.

 

[Diamondback]

PRECISELY, agricola ! I am happy to see that someone has their facts straight.

The Japanese had invaded China and occupied Manchuria with a brutality rivaling the Serbian genocide in Bosnia. Japan urgently needed all those things a powerful empire required, and never could become self-sufficient in; namely: non-ferrous metals, rubber..and above all OIL. The solution to the Japanese ruling hierarchy was simple : Japan would acquire the resources it needed from it neighbors and assure its direct supply by imperial conquest. China was the obvious source of supply. After Japan secured its supply line in China it signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy....binding the three countries to a kind of mutual support.

Next Japan began expanding southward forcing its way through Indo- China only to near its one major hurdle: the American protectorate of the Philippines.

The United States reacted by anouncing a general principle of behavior to the Japanese hoping to put a check on the the movement of Japan's violent expansion establishing primacy in Her backyard . The United States bluntly presented an ultimatum to the Japanese: withdraw its troops from China as well as Indo-China, accept Chaing Kai-shek's government as legitimate, and withdraw from the pact with Germany and Italy.

The Japanese delayed responding to our demands secretly planning an attack. Awaiting Japan's reply to US demands, a coded Japanese
message was intercepted by "Magic"; the Japanese intended to declair war on the United States. That message was NOT decoded until Pearl Harbor was under heavy attack !

It's one thing to despise FDR's social policies and quite another to be ignorant of your own country's history ! Get down on your knees and thank God FDR was President at the time. You think gun control in the US in bad now.....you ain't see nothing until a SS Unit goosesteps up to your house, kicks the door in, shoots you. ........and THEN takes away your guns.

 

[HBK]

Buchanon, I always thought, was a religious nut. THen I read a book called "Death of the West" (referred to me by a buddy on this site) in which he makes some excellent points in a very intelligent manner. I think he's a lot smarter than many people give him credit and I would not categorize him as a religious nut.

 

[ninenot]

So Agricola: you concede that Germany declared war on US (contrary to your first post you declare that FDR knew nothing about Japan's intentions (but the next poster states that MAGIC had the dispatch) and you declare that George Patton was wrong.

Well, you're wrong on Patton--and you have no friggin' idea whether Stalin could possibly have financed (let alone FED) the Soviet Army for another 12 months. Patton, most likely, did know--that's why we have military intelligence. And if FDR had not been so enamored of Communism, he would have dragged Churchill and DeGaulle along.

FDR was a very serious blot on the history of the Presidency in this country--until Nixon and Clinton came along and made FDR look good in comparison. He had no use whatsoever for the Constitution, and showed it. He was a narcissistic fop. At least, unlike Clinton, he was not a traitor.

 

[Malone LaVeigh]

If the point of the first post is to draw a parallel between WWII and Iraq, it fails. Whoever declared war first, the Germans and Japanese were allies, bent on hemispheric, if not world, domination. Iraq under Saddam and Al Qaeda were mortal enemies. While Saddam had once had ambitions for regional supremacy, he wasn't an imperialist in the way Japan or Germany were. And Al Qaeda (remember them? They attacked us.) is more of a movement of religious identity and anti-westernism.

Yes, the prez did lie to us, and we did get distracted and attack the wrong country in Iraq, regardless of what Buchannan thinks of FDR.

 

[Iain]

ninenot -

Japan were in alliance with Germany. Is this the reason that Germany declared war after the US declared war on Japan for their act of aggression?

Your point about the knowledge of Pearl Harbour being supported by diamondback isn't correct according to this quote from diamondback:

a coded Japanese
message was intercepted by "Magic"; the Japanese intended to declair war on the United States. That message was NOT decoded until Pearl Harbor was under heavy attack !

Dislike FDR's peacetime policies all you want, he was a good war leader. You think that the Nazi's would have stopped in Europe?

 

[DTLoken]

Substituting Iraq and Afghanistan for Japan and Germany is completely flawed due to the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan have no connection aside from being predominantly Islamic countries.

That's like saying The United States and Mexico are partners in terror because they're both primarily inhabited by Christians.

 

[agricola]

ninenot,

er..

i)I said at the start that Hitler declared war on the US - I dont understand your point;

ii)the poster pointed out that the MAGIC information wasnt decrypted until AFTER Pearl, which makes the theory meaningless. Check out the thread on that topic, which contained many salient points as to why the theory is deeply flawed - but that shouldnt excuse the fact that you have clearly taken a point out of context;

iii) Stalin was quite able to feed the Red Army because he did so at the end of the war. As for "financing the Red Army", are you serious?

iv) Churchill would not have been "dragged along" because he was in the process of suffering one of the biggest electoral defeats in British political history - to the Labour Party (then a socialist movement of the old school) no less.

v) oh, and FDR was dead.

 

[hillbilly]

As some posters have pointed out, there is absolutely nothing to the idea that Japan and Germany's relationship in WWII has any parallels at all when Iraq and Islamist Terror networks are mentioned.

There is no connection whatsoever between the War against Iraq and the War on Terror.

I mean, like Malone LaVeigh and DTLoken point out, the comparison has no basis in any logic or reality.

So, pay no attention to what comes after this sentence because there is no connection at all......

Ignore Abu Nidal being captured in Iraq by US forces. No connection at all.

Ignore all the following.....remember, no connection at all, no parallels,


http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html


* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")


* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden.

In fact, there are plenty of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.

The most compelling reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100 difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.

Bin Laden's personal wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001 wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.

So a common enemy, a shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."


Nope, nothing at these links either.......no connections at all..........


http://college.hmco.com/currentconflict/students/terrorism/timeline.html

http://www.intelmessages.org/Hack/ZAp Iraqi Involvement in Sept 11 Attacks 03.htm

http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/col/20021215edkelly15p2.asp

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq27.xml

 

[7.62FullMetalJacket]

Don't go throwing all of those little, troublesome facts around. The Saddam apologists may learn something

 

[Malone LaVeigh]

Nope, nothing at these links either.......no connections at all.....

Well, you're almost right. I didn't say NO connections with any terrorists. I pointed out the differences between two allied countries and two forces in the Middle East that were not allies, but largely enemies. The material from the source you cite was already largely debunked three months before the article you cite. All of the rest of the links you provided are at least a year old and largely discredited. Those same sources were saying we'd find lots of WMD there.

Jeez, some people will believe anything they hear..

Seriously, though, no one thinks Saddam was incapable of dealing with terrorists and using them for his purposes, including PR in the Mid East. The question is whether he was allied with the forces we went to war with in Afghanistan. The case has not been made, and there ought to be some credible evidence before going to war, especially if doing so will distract from the real target.

 

[hillbilly]

Okay.

More recent stuff.

This originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 9.


http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=44711


Also, interesting picture of interesting mural found in Iraq, too.


http://www.spiritoftruth.org/againstallenemies.htm


And I clicked on the "debunked" link above. It's a Washington Post article that says there is "talk" amongst high level folks and there is a "secret" report circulating that the connections are not as strong.

No specifics, no named sources, no specific facts. I reckon that's good enough for "debunked" for Malone LaVeigh.

hillbilly

 

[JohnBT]

Well, if we can't concentrate on two things at once we should just pack up and bring everybody home - close the embasssies, shutter the bases and mothball the military.

Meanwhile, there's work that needs to be done and somebody has to do it.

John

P.S. - I just found out today that Clarke was Clinton's policy man for Rwanda during the genocide. No wonder he feels so guilty.

 

[DTLoken]

What the ???? does a stupid mural have to do with another countries' government?

 

[HBK]

Hillbilly, you da man. Impressive research.

 

[agricola]

some views:

• Fact No. 1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport.

Someone who we are told is an Iraqi intelligence business (a business that we are later told is expert in creating new identities for its agents), intending to bomb the WTC as part of a conspiracy against the US, enters the US on his own passport (of a country the US has recently been at war with) which shows that he came from Baghdad!

• Fact No. 2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims, incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin.

Yasin fled to one of the very few countries that would be guaranteed not to extradite him, and one that he could be reasonably sure would support him (as a symbol of a strike against the US). This is not all that different to the Iraqi (in addition to most of the middle east) support (by sending money) to the families of suicide bombers. Its an easy way of pandering to Muslim sentiment without actually doing anything risky, and it doesnt mean that Iraq was engaged in the commission of the attack.

• Fact No. 3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven, Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal.

There are two problems with this - firstly, Mylroie expects us to believe that "Yousef" is an intelligence agent who enters the US on his own passport, and yet has to obtain a replacement passport from the Pakistani consulate for a character named "Abdul Basit", for which he has two photocopies of the '84 and '88 passports. As said above, if we are to expect that "Yousef" is an Iraqi intelligence agent engaged in a strike against the US then one would expect multiple, pre-arranged identities (especially given what she later claims).

As it is, its surely as likely that "Yousef" and "Basit" are in fact both false documents for someone with a far more amateur set-up, which Mylroie cannot acknowledge because it eliminates the Iraqi link to "Yousef".

Secondly, with 9/11 in mind two out of seven suspects is not that big a deal - anyone want to tell us how many of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi?

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents.

In addition to the points raised above, there are these. Firstly, there would have been nothing to stop Iraqi intelligence from creating an entirely "new" identity for "Yousef" (fingerprints and all) given that they were in control of the files, in addition to supplying him with a bona fide passport rather than photocopies.

Secondly, it is just as likely (if not more so given the photocopies and the small nature of the changes) that the switch could have been done by one person at any point prior to 1992 who had access to the files.

The Worldnetdaily article goes on to expose further the sillyness of the Mylroie claims

 

[RealGun]

Whatever happens over there is based upon

1) the need to protect oil supplies and prices

2) the need to relocate military bases out of Saudi Arabia, a move with scope grander than the Middle East alone. My guess, Kuwait and Iraq, since the UN can be ignored on the issue of Iraq. Kuwait is pretty much in place to ensure naval access.

3) an ongoing commitment to support defense of Israel

The rest is just details.

 

[Art Eatman]

I disremember how many decades ago I first read Kipling's "Kim", with its references to "The Great Game" of international efforts at some form of dominance. I watched the efforts of the USSR to gain political influence so they could have trade routes to the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean.

I've thus regarded international politics as an unending chess game, with never a permanent checkmate. Unending.

I've also been a map freak. I enjoy correlating events and tidbits of information with correlative locations: Oil in Kazakhstan; how to get it to Europe? Oil pipeline routes across Afghanistan or through the Balkans are also of interest.

We, Europe, Japan and China are locked into two facets: Our societies need oil in order to survive, and we are both in competition and in certain amounts of cooperation to ensure some orderliness in gaining supplies.

My view of the Great Game is that we're in the Balkans not due to humanitarian reasons involving Milosevic, but to gain enough order that a pipeline into central Europe from the general Crimean area would be possible.

I think we're in Iraq in part because of the WOT, but also as a way to eventually have bases there and withdraw from Saudi Arabia and possibly other parts of the Persian Gulf. Iraq is a central location from which to project power into the region at a lesser cost than that of the Navy--or the vulnerability of "pre-positioning" in an unstable Saudi Arabia. Stipulating success at pacification, it allows political dominance in an effort to create enough stability to ensure oil supplies into the west (China be damned.)

Justification? Well, considering how much whining now occurs with gasoline here around two bucks a gallon, imagine what happens to our already sick economy were it to get toward three. And imagine what that would mean to the costs of the myriad consumer products derived from the petrochemical industry--including the plastics of that computer you're using.

Art