**A Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago has an eye-opening OP-ED piece 5/18/05 on Bush vs World:

"Over the past two years, I have compiled a data base of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after the event. Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise.

The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian peninsula after 1980 (the Ronald Reagan and senior George Bush presidencies) enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000).

The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States. Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism."**

All of the above, and what follows, relate to an event of some two thousand years ago in which an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, challenged a religion of the Middle East, Judaism, a form of worship that had become arrogant, corrupt and self-serving. Today some deadly tentacles of that regime, until 1/20/09, directed the most powerful nation on Earth and, for the last eight years, have had the service of the most malignant President of the United States in its history. The collapse of the world financial system is evident to all. Less known is that Alan Greenspan's invention and touting of "derivatives" is the fundamental fault.