Quote Originally Posted by TheStender
As for Iran/Russia, that's worrisome. I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what threat Iran poses at the moment. Sure, in like five years, they might be able to have a nuclear weapon, so I don't see why everyone is getting bent out of shape about them. They have no navy or air force (in comparison to America's anyway), and their army would get steamrolled by us. So really, what is the threat?
Let's see if I can put it in relative terms. When was the last time you saw a Russian extremist blow up a train in Spain, or a bunch of buses in Israel, or US Naval vessels in international ports, or night clubs in <insert_country_name_here>, or shoot a bunch of schoolchildren in the back? Now, imagine people that don't even think twice about committing these kinds of atrocities and then imagine giving them access to man-portable nuclear weapons that are orders of magnitude more destructive than the largest car bombs currently feasible (think 20-40 times more destructive than the truck-bomb that blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City). What happens when Haifa ends up a smoking, radioactive crater? What happens when Istanbul becomes mostly uninhabitable for the next 50 years due to radioactive contamination?

To tie in to your assertion that Iran doesn't have any today and probably won't for another 5 years at least, what makes you think the nuke they use on Manhattan will be one they made themselves? Or, ruling that out, what makes you think the world's intelligence services will catch them with a nuke before they manage to use it on someone?

And as for actually using a nuke, the difference between the cold war powers and the free world versus islamic militants is that the US and Russia knew damned well we wouldn't be using those nukes unless they nuked us first. Mutually Assured Destruction. The fear of a no-win situation was what made initiating it unthinkable. Muslim fanatics, however, are perfectly willing to sacrifice huge numbers of their own people, not to mention all of us kaffir to bring about their vision of a perfect theocratic world. They are NOT interested in your freedoms or your desires or your hopes and dreams. If you are not a practicing, faithful muslim, you are vermin and should be crushed unter zee boot heel, jah?

I for one do not ascribe some subtext of benevolence to the islamic extremists (i.e.: "Oh, they're just mistunderstood.") as I can't seem to get the images out of my head of them decapitating people with rambo knives and propping the severed heads up on the body like some cheap halloween decoration, and laughing and congratulating themselves and praising Allah's Will while doing it.

You are perfectly free to pretend like the lessons of Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin do not apply to you, but that only means you will be extinct before the rest of us. Sheeple or citizen; the choice is yours.

And just to wrap up on the whole Ron Paul anti-war angle, I'll quote someone who I think had a pretty good handle on liberty: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."