We live in a country that is trillions of dollars in debt. I can't even fathom what a trillion dollars might look like; how many rooms of my house it would take to hold it. Yet we are sending billions each year to countries around the globe, many of which would like to see us all dead. What's going on here?

If our debt was called due, we would be the ones in need of foreign aid. We have outsourced most of our technical skills to places where the wages are lower and we don't even grow a lot of our own food anymore. Soon we will be totally dependent on foreign countries. Our trade deficit is weakening our security as well, as we import more than we export, and then from countries that are not exactly friendly with us, such as China and Saudi Arabia, but we still send those countries some form of foreign aid.

We are paying for a military that is stationed around the world in places where American military involvement has been over for more than fifty years, and we have sent our military into places where we had no interest and those troops were not under American command, but UN and NATO. And.....they are still in some of those places. We left Viet Nam with no American bases there, but we have not yet recieved one threat from that country. Do we really have a responsibility to defend South Korea or Germany? Should we have military presence in places like Bosnia and Japan? What about France? More importantly why not our own borders?

This brings me to our current involvement in the middle east. While at the time I wondered why we invaded Iraq when it was mostly Saudi's who hijacked our planes on 9/11, now I wonder why we are staying there when Sadam Hussein is dead and his entire regime is wiped out. We found no weapons of mass destruction, and largely what we did find was that Sadam was committing crimes against his own people, not Americans. What was our justification?

Afghanastan was another case. We were, we were told, after the mastermind of 9/11, Osama binLaden. I find it strange that our government can track an infected cow from Canada to its new home in Washington state, but cant find a six foot six inch tall Saudi in a country the size of one of our Western states. But I digress. The point I was trying to make is that since we have not found binLaden in about six years, and we have routed the Taliban in Afghanistan, why are we still there? How much longer do we expect to be there? To hear the government tell us, it will be a great number of years. If the war on terror goes as well as the war on drugs, you can expect that we will be there for decades.