In my previous posts Castles in the Air and Castles In The Air (Part Deux), I have addressed what mental traits make someone a liberal.  To review, these are: 1) A theoretical bent; 2) A demand for fairness; and 3) A degree of egocentricity that does not allow their theories to be disputed.  In today's post, I want to discuss where these people exist in life and look to the effects of that on our society.

It should be obvious that these three things are the anthesis of practical.  As such, any performance driven businesses such as entrepreneurship, craftsmanship, and athletics should be short of these folks.  Engineers should run away.  And, indeed, this is what we see.  The Small Business Commission is one of the most staunch conservative groups.  Prayer and conservative acts abound in the NBA, NFL, and other organizations that don't care how you talk, only how well you play.  At the highest level of sports this does change, but we'll get back to this in a moment.

Social science is great for these people as there are no results required or asked for.  So, they can use their theories and show that they are doing something.  To be a successful teacher in the teaching industry does not require the students to learn anything, so this is also good.  Entertainment DOES need talent, but that is mainly emotional projection, rather than craftsmanship and the egocentricity hooks these folks.  In the news business, you only have to put out something, regardless of whether it is correct and well done, or not.  Finally, the unemployed and unemployable have nothing but needs and wants, so here is where they fit.

So where does that lead us?  The invisible America comprising the workers, the entrepreneurs, and the committed tend to be Conservatives.  We see this in the conservatism of farmers, small business owners, and craftspeople.  The visible America of stars, newsfolk, and teachers tend to be Liberals.  Also, the young tend to be liberal until they run into the barrier of either having to go into a nonperformance driven profession or having to actually perform.

I said I would get back to the star athletes.  This also applies to the "star" CEOs such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.  When they reach the heights, they become more and more self convinced in their own opinions.  After all, they would not be so rich and so successful if they were not brilliant.  While I cannot prove it, I would bet that in most of these cases, when they were poor and building their careers, I would bet they were more conservative and only when they got into the limelight did they have a "social awakening".  In my opinion, this is because their egocentricity takes over, informing them that they are brilliant, so their theories must be right.  At the same time, seeing their massive wealth, they begin to have qualms about the fairness that they have so much and others so little.  As this process continues, some of these become the most rabid of liberals.

So, there is my analysis.  Please give me your feedback.

Looking at my previous writing in Castles In The Air, I have come to the realization that, while not wrong, I was incomplete in one respect.  As part of the theoretical basis on which liberals work, and as a direct result of their emphasis on what is "fair" rather than what is doable, liberals tend to want to address every problem.  They want to do this whether there is a good solution or not.

Lets say the problem is global warming.  The first question that a liberal asks his leadership is "what are you going to do about it?"  In my entry about Global Warming I discuss that any increase in temperature may be caused by solar cycles.  However, since it is/may be a problem, there is a demand both for the cause to be controllable by man and for a solution.

Take another example.  Throughout history, and without man's intervention, uncountable species have died out.  But now, our liberal friends want to ensure that no species ever dies out again.  After all "it's not fair" for them to die.  As if "fair" ever had anything to do with the real world.

And the list goes on and on.  Discrimination is not fair, so we make it illegal; hatred is not "fair" so we make a law; poverty? - A program is needed.  Racism?  DO SOMETHING D*MN IT!

So, the next time you see some wrong in the world and you turn to ask your representative what they are going to do about it, stop and think first whether there is anything that can be done about it, and second if it is any business of the government to do that which could be done.  If either of these are false, don't ask the question.

Our friend Flagwaver had a post on his blog called The Core that clearly identified characteristics of Liberal Democrats.  While I agree with most of what he wrote, I think he has not reached the core of the issue.  I believe that core is shown in my previous blog entry Castles In The Air.

In his entry, Flag shows ? basic characteristics of:

1. Everything is political
2. People are failures who need government support

I would also point to a post from yesterday where Yamu quotes David Pollard with these characteristics of Liberals:

1. Empathetic behavior and promoting fairness
2. Helping those who cannot help themselves
3. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves
4. Promoting the virtue of fulfillment in life
5. Nurturing and strengthening oneself

I think that both of these come down to what I said in my castles post.  The liberals are stuck in that grand world of theory and fair.  Look at their own post.  Fairness, help and protect others, nurture, fulfill life.  All of these things are bright shining goals, but are unattainable in a mortal world.

Fair is unheard of because the universe is not fair.  It is not fair that a deserving child dies while a murderer lives, but disease fells those children.  It is not fair that someone made millions with the "pet rock" while I live 50+ years and have no hope in sight of retirement. 

And helping those and protecting those, and....  The problem there is with those.  Unfortunately, they are people with all of their flaws of greed, sloth, envy, etc.

You see, the "great" liberal "thinkers" live in their Castles and look down on those below.  They build their theories (they are big on those) on how to help and then try to implement those theories.  They most always fail.  Since it cannot be the fault of the theories, the fault must be of the people themselves and of the enemies (the conservatives).

The way to help these fallible people to get  out of the way of the theory's success is to run their lives and provide for the people what they need.  Stop them from smoking, force them to buckle their seat belts, et. al.

The other thing, is that the thing stopping the theories from being used is those darned conservatives!  Everything MUST be political since if you let us run things and stop those conservatives from getting in the way, Utopia will be at hand!  We know better!  We have the theory!  All those grubby clay-bound conservatives have is reality and tradeoffs.  Get rid of them and come the New Jerusalem!

na·tion (nashn) NOUN:

1. A relatively large group of people organized under a single, usually independent government; a country.
2. A people who share common customs, origins, history, and frequently language

The United States was founded by and large by Europeans with the majority of them coming from England.  During the ensuing two centuries, more people came to this land for the space we had and for the opportunities we provided.  As Michael Barone told us here, we had 6% of our population come from Irish and German immigrants, but they were not unique and shared much of the common heritage.  There are also loads of stories from the immigrants where mamma told her children "We are in America now, Speak American."  Of all of our citizens, the immigrants tended to be the most patriotic and wanted to ape the culture they now found themselves in.  They did live in ghettos of co-speakers, but they got out as soon as possible into the population, leaving quaint "German Towns" and Irish pubs, but little else other than a strong vein in our national character.

And so it has gone through our history.  Where are the Chinese, Italian, Bulgarian, or Irish ghettos where they speak those languages?  Where is little Israel except in New York, the home of so many new immigrants?

But this new wave we are having is different.  The new hispanic immigrants are not taking the culture.  Our idea of diversity is allowing them to feel good about remaining Mexicans, Colombians, and Cubans.  There are many who have been here multiple generations and cannot even speak English.  Many areas in Texas and California where you cannot get around unless you speak Spanish.

What is wrong with that you may ask?  Let us consider a very civilized nation of Yugoslavia.  It was put together out of 4 distinct cultural groups.  These were the Greeks (Macedonia), the Eastern Europeans (Slavs, Croats, Serbs) and the Turks (Albanians, Bosnians).  None of these groups were encouraged to mingle, in fact they were encouraged to be diverse and keep separate as a way to pit one against the other.  When a massive military dictatorship fell, the nation flew apart as it was not one nation, but rather groups of "diverse" people under a ruler who was not their own.

And what do we see in Aztlan (The US States of Colorado, California, Arizona, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon and parts of Washington)? We see the hispanic peoples wanting enclaves of Spanish signage, Spanish language in schools, and their own media? Why? Because we have people who are in their third and fourth generation in the USA who cannot speak anything but Spanish and who do not want to.  They openly call for re-uniting with Mexico and bring in demands for Naploleonic courts.

If we do not get control of the runaway immigration, force assimilation, and force English Language only rules, I predict a civil war in less than 50 years where the hispanic "immigrants" try to force the anglos out and the American military attempts to maintain the union.  With our current politically correct climate, I do not know what the result will be.

One of the most interesting topics to me is the differences that I see between the sexes.  With apologies to the folks who say that behavior of little boys and girls is driven by nurture, I believe that much of it is pure nature. 

In a number of studies, it has been found that no matter how you socialize children to not play with gender specific toys, they have certain behaviors.  In a study of Monkey Toys, the author suggests that it is because boys have an innate love of things that are used actively or propelled through space.  Girl toys tend to be things with pink colors and that are involved with nurturing.  I am not totally convinced that this is the whole of it.

Whether through evolution or through design, primitive man had certain characteristics.  Women bore the children and were forced to less strenuous activity while bearing and while nursing.  They also had their monthly courses that provided negative clues to prey animals and positive ones to predators.  This meant that the women needed to stay close to the guarded places that became home.

On the other hand, men had to do those tasks that took them out into the land.  They had to hunt and haul and fight.  After all, there is no way a tribe could be supported only by the game that stumbled over an active and noisy campsite.

So, what characteristics do you need to be comfortable in a small area (defended areas need to be small to allow maximum defenses) with other people?  Well, you need to be able to communicate with each other, you need to have good manners, and you need to cooperate well in mass tasks.  On the other hand, to be good hunters, warriors, and explorers, you  need to have a restless nature, an inquiring nature, and, in most cases a violent nature.   Add this to the biological realities, and I think I have fairly well  described the human sexes.

"What biological realities?" you ask.  It is a simple mathematical realities that for a man to have the maximum possibility of passing his genes around, he needs to have the maximum number of partners.  Whether from choice, violence, or whatever other cause, if he has sex with 100 women this month, he has a much better chance of spawning a child than if he has sex with only one 100 times in a month.  In the first case, he has the chance of spawning 100 children at maximum and in the second, only 1.

Conversely for a woman, her best chance of passing on her gene is to protect and nurture the one child she can have every 9-10 months.  After all, regardless of how many lovers she has, once the child is conceived, she is infertile until after birth.

What is the result?  Again, men are rewarded by exploring, fighting, and other external tasks while women are rewarded by creating a solid home with protection and resources for survival.

These things generate things like the monkey toy study as well as other studies that show when given dolls, boys use them as hammers or guns and girls, when given hammers and guns, arrange them and play mommy or tea party.  It may be partly nurture, but mainly nature.

This leads me to my last point.  In study after study, the percentage of male children who are using Ritalin and other ADD/AHD drugs is 75% of the total.  Of male children, approximately 30% are prescribed some behavior modification drug.  When looking above, the reason is, to me, obvious.  Boy children like to bang things, throw things, run around, ask questions, and in general be disruptive in class.  Girl children want to work together, nurture, and get along together.  Which do you think a teacher wants in class?  It is my contention that the main reason for the prescription of most of these drugs for children is because boys have the terrible disease of being born male. 

Annals of Psychiatry
Canadian Study

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free. - Thomas Carlyle

Today on a thread concerning the lack of plans and vision from our Democrat rivals,  I realized an important truth.  In my 56 years, there are very few things that I can say I have learned that are natural and immutable laws.  However, one of them I will propose as Jeff's first law:

Every human endeavor consists of unavoidable tradeoffs.

For example, to have time to blog or respond to posts, I must trade my time with my family, watching TV, working, sleeping, or something else.  I cannot do both.  In my youth, I did not understand this and felt that it was "unfair" that I had to go to school or work to make a living.

In the thread, Left Angle posted the DNC's "Real Security - The Democratic Plan" http://www.democrats.gov/rs.html.

After much debate and discussion, I came to the realization that I could not really say that any of the points on the "plan" were unreasonable except for the plank that will have the President impeached out of revenge for Clinton.

But how can I, a reasonably staunch conservative, agree with the DNC?  That is because, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, these castles in the air "have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality".  Another quote also applies here.  "Ever building, building to the clouds, still building higher, and never reflecting that the poor narrow basis cannot sustain the giddy tottering column." - Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

I have come to see that the difference between a liberal and a conservative is not their desires for peace and justice.  It is that liberals are still living in that world of ideas and ideals and still believe that "it is not fair" that tradeoffs are necessary.  If you are, as many liberals are, in academia or government, it is even true to a degree.  When they trade something for their desires, it is not they who pay.  But someone does.

This then is why people like Left Angle honor intent more than action.  "At least we tried" has been told to me so so many times by liberals.  Remember Bill, the caring President?  He felt our pain and tried to help.  Did little, but tried and felt and cared.

And that is the reason we fail to speak to and convince our Liberal friends.  They live in the clouds of fair and free while we see the mean clay and narrow base on which it is built.

1. hu·man (hymn) NOUN: A member of the genus Ho&mo and especially of the species H. sapiens.

One of the great, but unvoiced arguments of our time is encapsulated in this question.  This question drives our philosophy in animal rights, abortion, genocide, stem cell research, euthanasia, infanticide, capital punishment, vegetarianism, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and so much more.

There are two very easy answers, but to me neither of these are satisfactory.  The first is proposed by various religions.  It says that a (hu)man is someone who has a soul provided by g*d that makes them special.  While I cannot disagree with this or disparage it, there is no easy test that can be made for the presence of that soul or identification of when it arrives and departs.  As such, that is not particularly useful in this discussion.

The other easy answer is by Peter Singer and his ilk.  They say that man is a biological machine, created by accident into a random universe without purpose.  This is a fully satisfying argument to atheists, but leads down some very strange pathways.  However, it is the prevailing model on the extreme atheistic left of the political spectrum.

If we are just a biological machine, then we are no different from a cow, a dog, a virus, or a cabbage.  Then we run through Singer's philosophical land where we should avoid ever causing pain, because that is bad.  We should value the life of a creature based on how they experience the world only.  Therefore, an oyster is ok to eat because it has no central nervous system to experience pain while a cow has a brain and the ability to think to a degree.  It is also proper to kill the aged, embryos, or profoundly handicapped children since it will cause them more pain to continue.  Terri Schiavo was not human, so there was no reason not to kill her.  Consider how this philosophy runs through all of the debates noted above.

Most people reject this notion and that is why it is seldom publicly discussed outside of academia.  But then, what is a man?  What test can we do?

The first is to go back to that definition, but that is slim help.  What makes you a "member?"  If it is your DNA, then a fertilized ova at the instant of conception is human.  But then too are shed skin cells.  Is it organized thought?  But a 1 year old dog has about the same cognitive abilities as a 2 year old child.  Is it the act of birth to a previously defined human woman that makes a human.  Then a child born of Caesarian is not human?  Tell that to my cousin.  He thinks he is.

Other things I have heard are the ability to laugh, especially at oneself.  That takes Hillary out of the picture (Just kidding).  But it makes profoundly retarded children and many "normal" and mentally ill adults inhuman and makes my dog human.  She does not have a staccato pattern of verbal laughter, but she expresses joy in a way that her mechanism allows.

Is it our ability to build?  See ants.  To create something new?  I am told evolution does this constantly.  Thus the "evolved" creature doing something new must be human?

I have been told it is our ability to live by a system of ethics.  But I am told on TownHall all the time by our left leaning friends that there are no absolutes, no right and wrong.  And I read people here and on Daily Kos who show no sign of ethics.

I really have no answer here.  But it is a question that needs to be addressed and that is at the bottom of what has been called the "culture war."  If we are souls from G*d, we have to live in godly ways.  If we are biological machines with no purpose, then "if it feels good, do it" is a rational response.

Yesterday, I wrote about why voting for our leaders is irrelevant.  This is because they don't really lead anything or do anything.  We are really led by unelected and untouchable bureaucrats.  Unfortunately, I have come to see that this is probably a good thing.  And the reason why comes down to how we select these idiots who we do elect.

Lets take a look at the man I think is the greatest politician of this century and possibly in the history of the US.  That man is Bill Clinton.  Bill was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he had no discernable core values, and as an orator, he was only average.  But he has the adulation of the left, of the media, of much of the Western world, and to my chagrin, approval of a large majority of America.  How can that be?

The source of this goes back to how we pick the people who run for office.  As I work in the local grassroots organization, I see many good people.  They have ideas, ideals, passion, and drive.  My local City Councilman is there every meeting.  I eat dinner with him occasionally and see him at least once or twice a month.  I know this man and I respect him.  The same can be said about most of the local pols.  But.... As I get to my Senator, Governor, etc.  I cannot know these people.  They come from other parts of the state or city.  They run in different circles, so I cannot rely on the familiarity I have with the locals.

So, how do people get nominated to these positions?  First, almost all of them have loads of cash.  The spend it on the other politicians in the state to get their attention and to obtain their good will.  They lean on their other wealthy friends to get the same thing.  Most of them avoid having positions, since positions can only reduce your circle of friends.  If I have no public pronouncements other than Mom and Apple Pie, I can always tell you I support my gay friends and tell the Reverend that being gay is a sin.  And both of you like me.

As I work at the lower levels, I gain friends who are in power because I helped put them there.  Then, when I ask for help, it is pay back time.  Did you ever hear that Dole and Bush I got the nomination because "it was their turn"?  I did.  And this is what that meant.  They had slogged for other people tirelessly and so they earned the right to get the chance now.  Once that is established, my power friends go back to the locals and explain that I promised them .... whatever I needed to impress each of them.  And perhaps this whole process gets short circuited.  After all, if I am tall, handsome, or from the right demographic, I might get the call since I am "electable".  But still the key is that I have to be a person who can do great in one-on-one conversations and in small groups.  If I can pretend to be honest and sincere, I can fake anything.  So I do.

Ok, so I got the nod and am running in the primaries.  Does what I say in the big meetings matter?  Not if I am smart.  I will talk platitudes and poll to find out the red meat issues, but unless I mess up, those meetings and debates will only give my supporters reasons to love me and they will not hear anything I say to make them hate me.  What does matter is how I come across to the press when we have small sit-downs over cocktails and how the ward leaders and other politicos like me over a game of golf.  After all, if they like me, there will be great stories in the media and the other people in my party will tell the folks what a great guy I am.

I just described Clinton to a T and, by the way, with some important exceptions, Ronald Reagan.  The exceptions for Reagan were that he did have ideas and ideals.  However, the rest of the stuff still applies.  He was a master of interpersonal communication and was a tireless worker for other candidates.  But his master in pure politics was the boy from Hope.  I often compare Clinton with the Music Man.  Both were flimflam men with a gift of gab.  Harold Hill sold boys bands while Clinton sold himself as President.

I usually end my blogs with a prescription for change.  However, here I am stumped.  The only possibility I can see is for the media, the internet, or someone to FORCE answers to the hard questions from these folks.  Even if they are in your party.  But I am not sure that will do anything but ensure your guy loses the race.

Do you folks have a solution to this conundrum?

I hope you have had a great Labor day week.  I am back to blogging after a week off to celebrate the holiday and to party with my wife on her birthday.

My topic today asks the question whether we should even bother to vote.  With all due respect to Flagwaver, I am not sure that we can make a difference by voting.  There are a number of issues that lead me to worry if not to despair.  Among them are how we pick our candidates, the role of the media, and the apathy and ignorance of the electorate.  But the one that I am talking about today is much more simple.

As we all know, enshrined in our constitution are the four branches of government.  There is the Legislative branch that creates the laws, the Executive branch that enforces the laws, the Judicial branch that interprets the law, and the Bureaucratic branch that ignores the law and does whatever they want.

All kidding aside, while this fourth branch was never in the constitution, it is real and holds more power than any other entity in government.  Our current civil service was created by the Pendleton Act after President Garfield was assassinated by someone who wanted a job.  The idea was to take patronage out of the mix and put in merit only.  Unfortunately, the result is less than attractive.  The average tenure for government employees is 17 years, meaning that the average employee was hired during the Reagan administration.  For the senior levels (the EX, SL, and Career SES levels) the tenure is closer to 35 years, putting it back into Johnson or Nixon.  And the reason for this is obvious.  It is nearly impossible to fire these folks.  In the NY school district, there has been much said about the "rubber rooms" where they put teachers they cannot fire.  This was learned from the Feds.  When I was in the government in the 70's, there were rooms like this all over.  At SAC HQ, we had a dozen people who were paid GS12+ salary to sit in a room, with no computer, no phone, and no job.  The idea was to bore them so much that they would transfer or quit.  At that time, the 12 folks had been in that room for more than a year.  And these were not the incompetents, these were the active threats to the ability to do the mission!  And it has only gotten worse.

So, how does this happen?  Well, Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs in their 1996 book The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective. They cite a vignette from a Columbia University study of city personnel management in which the inspector general of a 4,000-employee New York City agency asked each of the agency's four assistant commissioners to identify their ten worst employees. When he looked at the files of the 40 workers, not one bore even a single evaluation of "unsatisfactory." Why? Under civil service procedures, employees can challenge negative evaluations, like dismissals—a dispiriting maze few managers wish to enter, given so little hope of relief at the end.

The next factor is the who.  Who would fit in well in a bureaucracy where skills matter less than time in grade and where it is impossible to fire?  This would be the person with few skills and less ambition.  This would be the empire builder who builds empires for self and not the person who wants to get a job done.  When this person collides with a true conservative who wants smaller government, more accountability, and less waste, the sparks are bound to fly.  In surveys and in positions taken by Civil Service unions, the members are around 85% self described liberal Democrats.  OUCH!  While working in the government, I often was told that when a "new broom" or reformer came in at the top of the agency, you should just keep your head down so he did not target you for revenge and wait till the next appointee came in.  In the mean time, you could do what you wanted, since the bureaucracy is too large to be controlled from the top unless everyone was working toward that control.

Well, who are these people?  I mean what jobs do they hold?  They make up most of the managerial positions of the administration, of the Congressional Budget Office, and of the support staff for the courts.  As they are critical to the working of these organizations, they are leaned on by their bosses, which allows them to mold the opinions and the information that reaches the higher levels.  This is the true system of government we have today.  Government by Bureaucracy,

What can be done?  Several things must be done.  First, we have to take out the restrictions from firing.  Not all of them.  I don't think we should be able to fire a Democrat simply for being a Democrat.  However, as in business, once the boss makes the decision, it is your job to implement it.  If I were working in the NAS and my boss asked me to write a paper on how to combat Global Warming, I should either quit or write that darn paper!  If I write one that shows why Global Warming is a myth, or I go to the press with criticisms of my boss, I should be fired on the spot.  All of this leaking that comes from the bureaucracy MUST be stopped, and can only be stopped by firing the leakers.  There are other problems and other things that need to be done.  But as things stand, who we elect is irrelevant.  After all, the elected leaders have small impact on the true government.

http://tinyurl.com/j36nk
http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_4_fixing.html
http://www.opm.gov/feddata/html/prof0900.asp

In my last blog, our little Tan Bear challenged my implication that World War II and the current war on Islamic Fascism are in some way equivalent.  In today's entry, I would like to look at the similarities and differences between these two conflicts.

In his initial statement, the bear agreed with me that "There is always a bit of chicanery used by politicians when a nation is at war, or plans to go to war."  Great, so we know that in WWII and in this war, things were said that may or may not have been accurate for the purpose of selling the war.  He next compared the first Iraq war with the second, but I will ignore that for the purpose of this essay, as I am comparing WWII with the war and not other conflicts. 

The bear then goes on to state "By the time Pearl Harbor happened, Europe was quite aware of the German military buildup. Roosevelt did not need to cherry pick intelligence for people to figure out that Hitler was a dangerous guy. They read about it everyday in the newspaper and listen to news updates on the radio."  Hmmmm.  Sounds a lot like what I read every day and listened to on TV and radio on the run up to this war.  I don't think there is any sane person in the world who did not think that Sadaam was "a dangerous guy."  That said, the Bear's contention is that the reasons for war in Europe were valid and the ones for war in Iraq were not.  But what were those reasons?

It should be clear that Germany, like Iraq, was no direct threat to the United States.  Neither country has a sufficient navy or air force to threaten attacks.  And, in both wars, we WERE attacked by an partly allied force in a surprise attack on U.S. soil.  The Japanese hit us in Pearl Harbor and Al Qaeda hit us in New York.  As I said, the comparison is eerie.

So, Roosevelt declared war on Japan and Bush on the home of Al Qaeda (Afghanistan).  But Roosevelt also declared war on Germany.  Why?  And as the bear noted, people knew Hitler was dangerous, what does that mean?  The answer to this goes back to the treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.  This treaty had several requirements, among which were:

1. The disarmament of and limitation of the military forces of Germany
2. Reparations in cash (which put a strong pressure on their economy)
3. Requirement to leave all conquered lands and to return captives
4. Stationing of Inter-Allied Commissions of Control, with free access, to monitor the rules.
5. Banning of an air force.

After the first Iraq war, we signed a cease fire which had similar requirements. 

1. Disarmament, specifically of weapons of mass destruction.
2. Continuation of economic sanctions until all parts of the cease fire are met.
3. Requirement to leave all conquered lands and return captives
4. Allowing UN inspection teams free access to all sites.
5. No Fly zones over various areas of the country.

Again, the similarities are eerie.  And exactly what happened to these conditions that led to the next war?  Well, Hitler began the Hitler youth groups and others that allowed him to create an army without calling it one, thus rearming.  He started to build weapons.  Sadaam, by all accounts, attempted to hide his weapons from the inspectors in order to allow him to retain his weapons.  In spite of this, great quantities were found and destroyed.  Though there is strong evidence that much was not found and was transferred out of the country at the start of the war.  So, while this comparison is not totally accurate, in both cases, the leadership of the enemy attempted to bypass the requirements to be disarmed.

The economic issues did apply in both cases, and Hitler and Sadaam attempted to mitigate the impact.  Hitler by renegotiation of the amount to be paid (from 269 billion gold marks to 132 billion, to 60 billion).  Sadaam used the oil for food program to offset the impact of the economic sanctions and to pay for his rearming.  Again, very similar.

The third requirement, to pull out of all territories, was equivalent in both, though more severe for Germany in that they had to give up a number of traditionally held German territories.

Inspectors were required in both cases.  Hitler hid his rearming from the inspectors until he had developed enough strength to eject them.  Sadaam simply ejected the inspectors when he tired of hiding things.

The Germans were not allowed an air force and Sadaam was not allowed to use military aircraft over 2/3 of his territory.  The Germans created civilian pilot schools and glider schools to get around the restriction while Sadaam shot at planes patrolling the zone on a regular basis.  So Germany attempted to build an airforce while Sadaam sought to destroy our air superiority over his country.

So, what does all this say?  It says Sadaam was following the path that Hitler had blazed 60 years before.  But there is more.  In addition to the violations of the treaty, Roosevelt had other reasons to act.  Among them were:

1. Hitler had made no secret of his desire to expand to get back the land given up under the treaty.  This threatened both our allies and their economic contributions to our nation.
2. Hitler was working on advanced military weapons (tanks and planes) that looked to destabilize the situation.
3. Internal pressure groups in the US were concerned with Hitler's treatment of Jews, Gypsies, and others.
4. Roosevelt was afraid that if he waited, Britain would fall, leaving us without a base on the door to Europe.
5. Germany was the center for a growing fascist movement that took over Spain, Italy, and other nations at this time.  This again threatened our interests.

This again is eeriely similar to Iraq.  They did indeed threaten our allies in the middle east and there are few places on earth where we have greater economic requirements.  Sadaam was, by all accounts, desirous of developing both nuclear and chemical weapons.  Such development would destabilize the whole region.  As with WWII, a number of internal and external pressure groups pushed our President to help the oppressed citizens of Iraq, both Kurds and Sunnis.  While we had no worry with Iraq of losing our bases, we did have the great threat of the development of WMD and the sponsorship of terror.  Finally, like Germany and fascism, Iraq was one of the major supporters of Islamic fascism in the world with their payment to families of "martyrs", support in the form of training camps, supplies, and medicine.

In summary, I cannot understand how anyone can say there is "No Comparison, Jeff."  In fact, the comparisons are amazing and match down the line.  The only difference is that we fought WWII with an intensity we have not approached in this war.  In the 6 years of World War II, there were 24.5 million military and 62.5 million total deaths, adding up to 10 million dead per year.  So far in the 3 years of the Iraq war, we have had (at the highest estimate is 100,000 total.  If we take simply the number of deaths as a measure of the intensity of the combat we are are looking at WWII being equivalent to fighting at the current level of combat in Iraq for 300 years.

My last comment is that yes, we went into Iraq while it was still weak instead of waiting till it was built up fully as we did with Germany.  And, yes this is a different war that we have to wage in an unconventional manner.  This explains the intensity difference.  However, when we talk about the reasons we went to war, I cannot see any difference between this war and World War II in Europe.