Isn't it strange how some people rabidly support the war

When there is no chance they'll ever have to fight in it?

Glenn Greenwald of Salon has an article up about Romney's manly adventure cheering on the Vietnam War while doing all he could to stay far away from signing up:

More repugnantly still, both the NYT article and accompanying video contain all sorts of quotes from Romney and his co-missionaries complaining about how very hard life was for them in France because it was so difficult to convert people, without any sense of how that "hardship" compared to their fellow citizens' fighting and dying in the Vietnam jungle. It's hard to put into words what twisted self-absorption and lack of empathy is required to wallow in such self-pity -- exactly the same strain that led Romney earlier this year to equate his sheltered sons' work on his presidential campaign with other Americans' sons and daughters who are in the Iraq war that Romney so loves and exploits for political gain.

Romney's draft-avoidance isn't quite as shameful as Super Tough Guy Rudy Giuliani's, whose deferment request was denied in 1969, thus placing him at imminent risk of being drafted, when he somehow convinced the federal judge for whom he was clerking "to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an 'essential' civilian employee." The very idea that a first-year judicial clerk, just out law school, is "essential" for anything is absurd on its face. Yet the swaggering tough guy Rudy Giuliani used that blatant lie to ensure that someone other than himself was sent to fight in Vietnam.

But Romney's record is hardly better. Although he claims he was ultimately convinced by his dad that the war was wrong, he spent most of the war cheering it on -- from the same safe and sheltered distance where one finds most of our right-wing tough guy warriors today, the ones who understandably recognize themselves in both Romney and Giuliani. Needless to say, a centerpiece of both of their campaigns is how "tough" and courageously pro-war they are.

Freedom brings a clash of cultures

As Central Asia has discovered:

MOSCOW. (Igor Rotar, a freelance journalist, for RIA Novosti) "Russians colonized us. Now, we are free at last-but European and American missionaries flooded my country as soon as we won independence.

They are out to make my nation a Western puppet," a Turkmen secret service officer hotly said to a friend of mine, a local Protestant.

Though his reasoning surely did not hold water, he was correct on one point. Protestant missionaries are really among the most effective disseminators of globalization. They openly say they want to turn this world into one big community resting on Christian values, democracy and the free market. They see South Korea as one of their greatest victories-a former Buddhist country where Christian converts presently make up a majority. South Korean missionaries working in Central Asia emphasize that the Protestant faith alone has made their land an affluent and inalienable part of the civilized Western world.

Obstacles to globalization are nowhere so formidable as in former Soviet countries, especially in Central Asia-a region that serves as practical proof of Samuel Huntington's warning. As the American political expert once said, attempts to turn the world into a single community would meet harsh resistance in Muslim countries.

"Democracy clashes with the Islamic canon. It's a godless system that gives an alcoholic atheist the same rights as a pious Muslim! True Believers have no use for Western individualism. We Muslims have lived in a community since time immemorial. We do everything together. Our concept of freedom of speech is also quite different from the European one," a Central Asian of radical convictions told me.