First off...
Last I checked Oak Ridge hadn't done nuke work since the reorganization in the 1970's, these days they're mostly a DOE thinktank. Should people have been able to sneak in? No. But realistically speaking, if you're worried about people getting their hands on nuclear weapons, you really ought to be looking more at Eastern Europe and less at the United States. You also might want to give France a little chat about selling nuclear reactors to people.
Now, for the rest of it.
We're in Iraq. Deal with it. If we leave now, every positive thing we've done there will collapse inside a month, the country will devolve into a lengthy civil war, and we'll be left with a considerably bigger mess than when we started.
Regarding WWII: Do a little more research on the Lend/Lease program before you decry the involvement of the US in the war. The US DID save the collective arse of Europe, and gave the Soviets enough time to save their own collective arses. If this leaves a bad taste in your mouth, feel free to pay back the money we forgave you. Inflation adjusted, of course.
Regarding pulling troops out of foreign countries. Well, I think Germany is a good place to start. Hell, Europe in general strikes me as a great place to slash our military involvement. Iraq, on the other hand, not so much. Ditto for South Korea.
What bugs the daylights out of me are people who in the same breath decry the measures taken by the goverment to increase national security, and then say how lacking our security is and how we need to tighten it up. You want a what-if scenario? Load a cropduster with nerve gas and go to a NASCAR event. Find a sufficiently unscrupulous individual in some failing East European country and obtain a sample of smallpox. Infect yourself, then go on a world tour. Release Anthrax spores into the airconditioning system of the Sears Tower.
What does the Patriot Act really do? Most people have no clue. They say "OMG PATRIOT ACT IS WRONGORZ!!" and have no idea WHY. That bothers the life out of me. At the heart of it, it allows our various agencies and databases to talk to each other. That's the core of the patriot act. Yes, it has provisions in it that are... less than likable. Most of which would fail if challenged in the Supreme Court, and that's fairly common knowledge, so those provisions are rarely enforced. The heart of it all though, still bothers some people. They're of the belief that the CIA and FBI and local law enforcement should NOT be allowed to talk to one another. That the government shouldn't be allowed to organize all the data IT ALREADY HAS into an easily searchable format.
On the concept of "War for Oil". You people don't read, do you? Honestly. You might note that we haven't gone in an nationalized Iraq's oil fields. There aren't secret stealth tankers moving out in the dead of the night shipping Iraqi oil to the greedy plutocrats of the American kleptocracy. Though sadly, there are people that believe that's exactly what's happening. You wanna talk War for Oil, you MIGHT have had a case in the first Gulf War, where it was by UN decree that we moved in and liberated Kuwait. On a side note, who footed the bill for that little operation? Not the UN. But even there, it was less about seizing oil than making sure that no one person in the Middle East controlled too much.
As far as catching Bin Laden: We can't, so long as he has people willing to hide him from us. Yeah, we caught Saddam... by moving in, conquering the entire country, and putting tens of thousands of troops to work doing that one task. And now for the connecting point...
As far as the War on Terror: It CAN be won. Much like the "War on Drugs", the "War on Poverty", and so on. We're just insufficiently ruthless to do so. Most societies are, even the ones that look sufficiently hard from the outside. The trick to beating terrorism is simple: Use the same tactics, only on a vastly larger scale. I made a post about that a little while ago, lemme dig up the relevant quote:
Terrorism persists because of the support of the society. And, to be brutally honest, despite how horrible they think we are, they have NO IDEA what the US military is in fact capable of. We could, if we so desired, pick a city a week and obliterate it without ever indulging in nuclear weapons. JDAM packages on FAE bombs, dropped from high altitude against a fully supressed target. Paint a nice little grid, destroy everything above ground. Come back the next day with ground penetrating bombs and dig craters everywhere, destroying the utilities that support the city from below. Then send one last flight over with persistent cluster munitions, and do the equivalent of "salting the earth". Rinse, repeat. If we wanted to be the "Great Satan", we could do a hell of a job of it, no pun intended. And frankly, I'm tempted to do exactly that, at least once. Fly over to Iran, and destroy it from the air. Don't bother sending in troops to occupy, just bomb it back to the stone age. Turn an entire country into a giant object lesson.
Do I advocate doing so? Not really. As it turns out, I'm not ruthless enough to do it either, I think.
