pancho and lefty

The UN had no part in Desert Storm or in stopping short of deposing Saddam.  They were pretty much against the war from the get go.  At the time stopping short of toppling Saddam was controversial, but in retrospect, seeing how well knocking off Saddam worked for the son, it was probably a wise move.  Came across this paragraph while consulting with the wiki, it rather surprised me.

There was some criticism of the Bush administration, as they chose to allow Saddam to remain in power instead of pushing on to capture Baghdad and overthrowing his government. In their co-written 1998 book, A World Transformed, Bush and Brent Scowcroft argued that such a course would have fractured the alliance, and would have had many unnecessary political and human costs associated with it.

In 1992, the U.S. Defense Secretary during the war, Dick Cheney, made the same point:
I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties, and while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the [1991] conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.

And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam [Hussein] worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.^[126]

— Dick Cheney

That was another odd thing about the neocons, some of them like Dick and Rummy were reasonable people before they caught the fever.

The Israeli thing is indeed complicated.  The one problem is all the countries around them vowing their destruction, but they have been able to defeat them pretty handily, and now they are all off fighting each other.  The other problem is the problem within.  Predictions are that their Arab citizens will outnumber their Israeli citizens within about thirty years.  I would use the carrot more than the stick myself, but the Palestinians are hard to deal with.

I think the most commonly accepted reason for the drop in crime is simply that the country's median age is going up and young people commit more crimes than old people.  I was pretty opposed to concealed carry, I was expecting a bloodbath, but then as you pointed out, it doesn't seem to have made much difference either way.

I guess packing heat wouldn't be that bad in the wintertime when you are all bulked up, although just last Friday a notebook fell out of my coat pocket and now all my jotted down wisdom is lost.  But I guess you wouldn't just stick your gun in your pocket.  I've seen on tv where some guys just shove it under their belt, but then you know where it's aiming then.

I guess you get a holster, and isn't that one more damn thing you have to pay money for and then you have to remember to put it on and take it off and it doesn't look all that comfortable.  And what about when you took your coat off, and what about summertime? 

I was going to say something about Texas leading the way in open carry but the wiki tells me that about half the states have it.  Damn that would make me nervous, walking into a grocery store of a local bar and everybody is openly packing.  But I don't know, isn't a little better than if you don't know who is and who isn't.  What's that line from Pancho and Lefty?

Pancho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel


So what is the deal with open carry?  To people want to intimidate their neighbors, or do they just want to dress a little more comfortably in the summer?