There are television programs, “Discovery”, comes to mind, that are showing the most modern of United States arsonal of “Future Weapons” Weapons from sound; light; lazer beams; heat beams; and more! More than you can imagine! More than I can remember!

I am somewhat interested in everything under the sun, so to speak. So I am of course interested in, not only “Future Weapons”, but also the very act of “invention”. I do have some small knowledge of both. I’m not kidding you here, I’m old!

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The U.S. is now engaged in a slow, painstaking effort to reconstitute the Iraqi military under new training. It will take years before the Iraqis will be able to fully defend their country on their own. John Murtha says that our departure would in effect take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. He recommends that we leave in short order while maintaining troops in nearby countries to deal quickly with any military emergencies. If this conflict is primarily about our presence, would you agree with Murtha that, with our departure, the Iraqi people would turn on both the insurgents and the terrorists?

First, our military presence in Iraq, indeed, has proven to be a magnet for Islamist terrorists, both foreign and Iraqi. It also has galvanized an insurgency by other disparate groups opposed to the U.S. presence. To Islamist radicals, the U.S. intervention in Iraq has some parallels to that by the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In their eyes, foreign, non-Muslim aggressors must be bled and defeated — cause for jihad, or holy war. Many of the foreign Islamists saw action in Afghanistan, then Bosnia, before going to Iraq. While withdrawal of our troops would remove a large and attractive target for these fighters, it would not end fighting against the government we would have left in place nor between ethnic/religious groups.

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Like Mullah Mohammed Omar (Taliban terrorist), Pol Pot (maoist dictator) and Fidel Castro Ruz (communist dictator), Uday Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was notorious for torturing sportsmen. During the 1998 Arab Games, Uday , Saddam Hussein´s son, threatened to make the Iraqi national soccer team pay the costs of the trip if they did not achieve good results. Who was Uday? He was president of the Iraqi Olympic Committe. Don Yaeger wrote in an article published in Sports Illustrated in March 2003, “Uday’s penchant for violence has long been an open secret among international athletic officials. Amnesty International reported in 2001 that Uday had ordered the hand of a security officer at his Olympic headquarters to be chopped off five years earlier, after the man was accused of stealing sports equipment that was missing (but later turned up). In 1997 FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, sent two investigators to Baghdad to question members of the Iraqi national team who’d allegedly had their feet caned by Uday’s henchmen after losing a World Cup qualifying match to Kazakhstan. The investigators spoke only to people whom Uday had selected. The result: a report exonerating Uday “.

Abdul Wahid Aziz is a weightlifter from Iraq who won a bronze medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy.

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