@mousy,
The attcks have nothing to do with who the president is at any given time.
Al Qaeda, for the 50th time, want the U.S. to abandon Saudi Arabia, the holy
land, so that they can overthrow the regime there and spearhead an Islamic
Republic in the region. As long as we stand in between them and that, they
will attack us to harass us into leaving the area.
What can we do about it? Leave? We need the oil, and even if we decided
we didn't want the oil from the mid-east the way the oil market works whatever
happened there would still affect it.
The answer lies in undermining the supply of volunteer suicide bombers and
insurgent fighters that they are dependant on to carry out their attacks.
How do we do that? By making governments such as the one in Saudi Arabia
stop robbing the national treasuries blind and providing actual opportunity,
education and freedom and democracy to their people. Once western
involvement is beneficial to the people in the streets they won't be so
quick to accept the word of someone that Allah will provide a better existance
in the afterlife and wants them to die in a violent act.
It won't happen overnight, so somebody needs to get on it, quick.
Other than that it will continue and escalate forever. Suicide bombers are
cheaper than smart bombs. IED's are cheaper than Hummers. Western
time runs faster than stone age middle-eastern time. They simply plan to
wear us down for one-hundred years if that's what it takes. We provided
he model by assisting them in taking on the Soviets in Afghanistan. The point
there wasn't to win, it was to keep them mired there, in what we went through
in Vietnam, until something - the economy, their hold on other territories-
gave out and they fractured. This is what Bin Laden has been trying to lure
the U.S. into since the first Gulf War, and we stupidly went the extra mile
into Iraq (after Afghanistan didn't turn out the way he planned) to give it
to him.
Will we have a female president any time soon? No, I don't think so.
The reason: women. Women support women who display female qualities
like nurturing and jovialness, and resent women who are more reserved,
rational and "male-like." Women won't support the same women men will
find suitable to be leaders... at least not in America. Thatcher is Britain's
idea of how a prominent women should conduct herself, and they've had
a lineage of Queens raised to project a stoic image. Oprah and Rachel Ray
seem to be what American women regard as an ideal, and men won't trust
the country to someone that openly emotional.