On the Israel thoughts. One day the Arabs will try to take Israel again. If a Muslim extremist gets a tatical nuke and uses it on Israel you can bet that Israel will burn the middle east down. I have read online, weather true or not, that Israel has nukes using cobolt tampers. The U. S. doesn't use cobolt tampers because of how dirty they are. Cobolt tampered nutron bombs would cause radiation levels to be so high that any area hit by one would be uninhabitable for a thousand years. The capital cities in the middle east and Mecca and medina would be all hit and the muslin world would cease to exist. Before Israel allows itself to be overridden it will commit genocide like what has never been seen on earth. Bet on it.
Five gallon tanks are heavy. I think women, the handicapped and the elderly would find it impossible to deal with and most of us would find it to be a pain in the ass. Natural gas cars come with a carbon-fiber tank that won't rupture easily in a collision, holds 20 to 40 gallons, and is as easy to fill up as gasoline. The only difference is that you have to lock the nozzle onto the fill pipe.
Who? Why? Egypt only wanted the Sinai back and they got it already. They turned down getting Gaza back, they don't want it. Syria has more problems than Egypt and they only want the Golan Heights back, not to conquer Israel. Jordan couldn't conquer itself and long ago refused to take the West Bank back. The Arab world is big on rhetoric and small on capability. Iran make a lot of noise but has absolutely no capability to invade Israel. Saudi Arabia has even less capability and no desire for Israel at all. The Palestinians are warring among themselves and had alienated most of the world and most of their friends. They don't have the capability to burn down the entire middle east. Even we don't. What the Israelis have promised is that if ever threatened with annihilation or attacked with nuclear weapons, Mecca and Medina will be flattened under mushroom clouds. That should be deterrent enough. No cobalt salted bombs have ever been built. There is simply no point in building doomsday weapons, you have lost if you use them. The US and Russians abandoned this research in the 60's. The sheer size and cost of such a weapon makes it unlikely to be built. It would literally bankrupt most countries. Furthermore cobalt 60 has a half-life of 5 and a half years, not 1,000 years. Moreover it would take many tens of thousands of such explosions to "burn down the middle east" and could not be done without killing many millions of friendlies, not to mention millions of non-combatants. The Israelis spend their defense dollars far smarter than that. They spend it on weapons that they are likely to use. It's a fantasy. The last thing that the Jewish people are going to do is to turn into Nazi's.
The F117 is crap. It really is. The F-15E is far superior in many aspects and has a long record of accomplishments. Soon, the F-22/F-35 will be the next big thing or maybe a new UN-maned stealth bomber ....
I disagree, Red ..I cannot source the quote, but it is something like this.."There is no shortage of oil under the earth's surface, but there is a shortage of $40 a barrel oil under the surface." And there you have it. I would gladly pay a huge differential to ensure we are never ever ensnared in the mid-east cauldron again. OR...if we were willing to play real hardball, which I endorse, we just go in and blacktop the entire region. Either way works for me, but petro-politics is a loser.
It's a recipe for economic collapse. Not many are prepared to increase their energy costs by a factor of 10. Sure, we have many normally unrecoverable reserves in the US, but they would result in 500 to 1000 dollars a barrel oil and $20/gallon gasoline. Why would we bankrupt ourselves using this expensive energy when $50 to $100 barrels are available inernationally? Doesn't it make more sense to reserve this for a day in the near future when the middle east reserves have been depleted and the world is desperate for oil? By then the commodity price of oil from anywhere will be extremely high. Then it makes sense to work those oil sands, deep strata, and other hard-to-recoverable oil because any oil will be $500 a barrel or more. Then we will have it and not be forced to buy at those prices from other dwindling foreign reserves. Any nation that is not planning at least a century ahead in energy production is going to be in deep Kim-chee in a century.
The United States has only invaded two of those countries. And we haved not created Muslim enemies. They just naturally hate anyone who is not Muslim, believing them to be infidels.
Your logic only works one way. How many innocent people have we killed in our defense. What say them?
