Addendum ...

FROM the comments to Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times:

Aredee
Madison, WI
November 15th, 2009
9:22 am

Fort Hood is an example of how religious doctrine can be used as an excuse for mentally unbalanced people to assume the role of the God they claim to worship. It's not only Muslims who fall in this category, but Christians who blow up Federal buildings and murder abortion doctors. It also applies to ultra-Orthodox Jews who assassinate Israeli prime ministers.

There are hotheads of all types and sizes looking for a holy war. Cooler heads should prevail.

Afghanistan is the latest chapter in America's attempt to play God in another fashion, by recreating the world in our own image. It's time to quit wasting our soldiers' lives and our resources and focus on what it will take to finally bring the U.S. infrastructure, education, and social safety net into the 21st century.

OR:

Phil in the mountains of Kyushu
Japan
November 15th, 2009
9:22 am

... Please consider, however, one certainty: that the machinery of Corporate America relentlessly moves on — that it inspired the original 9-11 attacks, and that it yet rules in all its madness, leaving all helpless to it as to the wars it also causes.

To see the real dynamics, of which we may be certain, look back to last week when on same day this online NYT posted an odd pair of stories. One described the large numbers of Pakistani youth who now take their rock music in their rapping, angry versions more favorable to the Taliban than to anything in the West. The other chronicled a 100-million-dollar boon for himself in Kurdistan by one Peter Galbraith. As a former ambassador, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and writer for the “New York Review of Books,” Galbraith had all the cred he needed to help in reconstructing Kurdistan — but he also parlayed that into his own sweet carpetbagger $100m.

What can we say about American culture now, when corporate “ethics” so rule that one as otherwise decent as Galbraith shows the same underside we all know across Wall St., D.C. lobbyists, CEOs, infotainment media, arms dealers, higher ed admin, and the Ivy cordon insulating Barack?

The world can see through Corporate America. Afghan and Pakistani youth can see through it. Palestinians can. All global versions of the Iroquois, Cherokee, and Sioux can see what’s happening to them now in their turn, too.