THE LONE RANGER, SUPERMAN & SPIDER MAN
Americans love their comic books, and they love their heroes, like The Lone Ranger, Superman, Spider Man, Super Woman, etc., fictional characters who butt into all sorts of problems that don't pertain to themselves, but being good-hearted, they pop in and risk their lives to take on the bad guys in order to help good triumph over evil.

We've all grown up on this genre. Now many of us are well in adulthood, even old age, and we're still following these Buttinskies, only in the movies, right down to the earliest one on the comic pages, Dick Tracy, a forerunner of all the other heroic comic strips.

Well, that's sort of what we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bullies, the bad guys, the Taliban, had take over in Afghanistan and they were holding the population hostage. Three million people had fled their homeland and were camped in miserable conditions just over the common border with Pakistan. They had no where else to go. They were living in tents and dependent upon food from the U.N. and other nations to keep them alive.

Even though they had given us terrible provocation to do something in the nineties, little was done either to destroy Bin Laden or curb his penchant to do evil around the world. It took a new administration and decisive action to put a halt to that kind of terrorism.

Little is said about it today, but literally a miracle happened after American troops defeated the Taliban. Those three million people left those camps and went home. Never before in history has such a mass migration home occurred like this. Never. When you think of the costs to the UN alone of trying to take care of this multitude, it is staggering.

They're not out of the woods yet, but damn it, those who are so against the current Administration should at least recognize the good that has come out of the war there, the good for a nation that was suffering under the lash of the Taliban's enforcers, and to those who had been driven from their homes.

We cannot report that everything is going as planned, but one thing you can be certain of, the millions who have returned are rebuilding their homes and businesses, and given the freedom to do so, they will once again be part of a thriving vital nation.

The anti-war movement is so vitrolic and venomous that they won't even admit that some good for millions of people has come out of that action, nor even the current one. That's stunted mental growth, if you ask me.

In Iraq millions more were expected to flee when the U.S. forces invaded their country, and so camps were set up for them across the borders. How many fled? From what I have heard, less than 100. Doesn't that tell you how much they must have feared the U.S. and what we would do to them?

We stopped the executiions of thousands of innocent Iraquis when we caputred Bagdhad, the torture of many more, by members of the extremist Baath Party. In spite of the destruction of much of the infrastructure, citizens of Iraq have remained at home and they are slowly rebuilding their lives. There are still members of Saddam Hussein's army at large who are causing problems, but all in all, our young men are the super heroes once again, inheriting the legacy of Superman, Super Woman, Spiderman and even Flash Gordon.

We had reason to be Buttinskies, and we're there and the people in those countries well know that they are safe with Americans temporarily in control. Oh yes, like the Lone Ranger we'll ride off into the sunset one of these days, leaving the folks there a lot better off than before we got there, believe me. Hey, if you read the comics, you do believe, don't you?

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