The only real possibility to fix crony capitalism is with true democracy, which means mandatory public financing of political campaigns, banning of private political contributions and lobbying, banning of super-pacs and other groups, etc. So I won't hold my breath that enough mundane people will magically become sufficiently enlighten enough to support it. (Especially with the steady decline in education.)
This.
The problem with trying to fix the system from the inside is, once you're inside, you have a vested interest in keeping the system as is. Yes, it's broken, but the only people who can fix it are getting reelected due specifically to those campaign contributions from those high powered lobbyists and super-pacs. It's a classic case of 'who will bell the cat?'
Agreed. I've really been idling my brain with the idea of finding a viable third party idea that the dissatisfied 88% of the country can get behind, and I think that a party like the pirate party would do a good job. Unfortunately, the name is a serious problem for American voters...and at the same time there's no good way to get the publicity and initial support without the name.
Nor is there any real substantial access to matching Federal funds available to any 3rd Party candidate. If you're not a Republicrat (and I use that word to mean both wings of the Party, Democrat and Republican, it's all the same anymore except for transient soundbyte generating fluff disguised as Vital Issues), you're pretty much out of the consideration, especially when the Party keeps saying 'If you vote 3rd party, you're wasting your vote!! Vote for us instead!'
With zero options, and the Party finally being upfront about it, the 88% just doesn't vote anymore, they're smart enough to know there are no real choices, just different sets of meat puppets with the same set of hands up their asses.
People are stupid and afraid of anything 'nuclear'... Just hope no one tells them they have about seven billion billion billion atoms inside their person...
Or that said atoms are created by solar fusion in a long dead star. Gotta love their faces when you explain it to them and follow it up with 'So, how's it feel to be nuclear waste?'
That is true. It is also the case that the pollution produced by that plant's normal operation would have caused many cases of respiratory diseases and low-to-medium levels of chronic poisoning.
Maybe in a nasty 3rd world coal plant, but Japanese (and most western) plants are legally required to use filtration that captures most of that. It isn't perfect and there is still some damage to health, but probably not more than from Fukushima.
Chinese coal plants aren't as heavily regulated as Japanese or American coal plants. They're due west of Japan, and the wind blows right over it. And the Chinese never signed the Kyoto Accords.
At current typical launch prices, space solar power satellites simply are uneconomical. I could go over the math here, but unless you are obtaining the resources to build these satellites using resources from a company like Planetary Resources (aka from asteroids or from the Moon), you simply can't get them built. Certainly it is foolish to try to ship all of the materials out of the deepest gravity well in the Solar System besides the Sun and the gas giants. That doesn't even touch the issues of the rectenna.
Yeah, when I read that article before I submitted it, I was wondering how they intended to pull it off cheaply enough to make it work. I didn't see a thing in the proposal about using asteroidal/lunar materials. Still, it's a bold plan, and if anybody could pull it off, the Japanese can.
IIRC (been awhile since I've read the article, so don't quote me), they were planning on floating the rectenna in the ocean someplace off the coast. Not a bad idea.
So if the risk isn't zero, don't do it ever? You can have a heart attack in bed, does this mean we should ban beds, too?
Yes, things will crop up all the time, and just not in nuclear powerplants. To use my favorite example, the Perry power plant had a small lubrication fire in a pump bearing, easily controlled, the fire was out and the pump replaced in a matter of hours, the lights didn't even dim in Cleveland. The 'no nuke' people wanted an immediate shutdown and dismantlement of the entire plant, even though there was no real danger, the place wasn't gonna explode, and the pump in question had nothing to do with cooling the reactor itself.
So.. nuclear is ok, as long as nothing unexpected happens. If it does, then massive swaths of the earth will be rendered unusable.
No, I'm saying the earthquake/tsunami combo was a 1-2 combo punch. Keep in mind also that both the earthquake and the tsunami were pretty big events in their own rights, and more destructive than such events usually are. The plant would have survived either, which was reported at the time, just not the two together. Neither event is so common that you could expect them to happen on a regular basis, thus the combo was so outside the box, they considered the risk so microscopic, they didn't plan for the combo. It's like predicting you'll have a heart attack and a simultaneous stroke on a daily 15 minute commute on the freeway that causes you to ram a propane truck causing an explosion that rips a bigass hole in the bridge you just happen to be crossing and kills a bunch of people. What are the odds? Way slim, 1 in a million, maybe, or we'd be hearing about that exact thing all the time. Granted, the odds aren't zero. But they're not inevitable, either.
You still use some electricity to run the thermostat & blowers. Just ask any HVAC tech. Even gas furnaces aren't pressure-fed, you need a blower to move that hot air into the ducts & into the house. Blowers work on electricity.
Yeah, they waited til spring to turn off all their nuclear plants. They're predicting rolling blackouts throughout the summer even with 15% more energy conservation than they are doing at this moment. Ever been in Japan in the winter? It's not a tropical country, in case you didn't know. They understand snow there very well, and not just in the mountains. Come winter, they'll either have to turn some of those nukes back on or be totally fucked.
Japan has essentially no internal oil or natural gas resources. Everything has to be imported. As a result of the nuclear shutdown, imports are up. Way up. So are prices.
IIRC, that was one of the reasons for the attack on Pearl Harbor that got the US involved in WW2 when the Americans decided to cut petroleum and metals imports to Japan in order to slow them down a bit in their war effort in China. Of course, I was taught that 45 years ago back in the Stoned Age of the 60's in high school, they obviously teach more politically correct points of view these days, judging from the history texts I read when my kids were in high school.
Hang on a second, let's look at the situation as it stands. 100% of reactors offline and yet Japan is still the 3rd largest economy in the world, still one of the most high tech countries in the world, not suffering from blackouts or severe damage to its manufacturing industries. Okay, this summer will be harder, but it isn't going to cripple them. At worst some people are going to get very hot when they are forced not to use air-con.
They let most of their reactors run over the winter to provide the needed power. Now they're trying to cut useage by 15% because their baseline capacity has shrunk significantly. They're trying to bring their old coal plants back online to make up some of that capacity, and they still predict rolling blackouts in 2-3 months when the summer weather cycle hits. Then things will cool down a bit and winter will hit. The fun in Japan is just starting.
An economy needs business and production to keep moving. Production needs energy. Where are they going to get this energy to sustain what they have, let alone increase their production? 'Alternative energy' sounds nice, No way it can handle a baseload, it's too unreliable. The only place with 100% sunshine 100% of the time is in space. Same with the wind.
A few months ago, I posted a story about Japan wanting to put a solar power satellite in orbit by 2020. It's way down in the stack now, and it was pre-tsunami, so it's been awhile. If they can hang half a dozen SPSes delivering 10 MW each to the ground, they wouldn't need their nuke plants unless they wanted to meet the 20% reduction in emissions they promised to make by 2020. The SPSes were part of that original plan.
Here in the States, there's been some interest in hanging SPS rectennas in the Mojave Desert so they'd be close to California where the power will be needed. Environmentalist lawyers started screaming about 'living in a microwave oven' and it never got out of the planning stages.
You must be thinking of LMFRB (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) which was heavily backed in lieu of LFTR despite the latter having a proven track record.
IIRC, the LMFRB design was pushed because of the usefulness of one of its waste products - Pu-239, very handy for things that fly very far very fast and go boom very loudly with lottsa damage.
Some of the Fukushima reactors were only 25 years old. Since it was obviously an unsafe design, at what point should it have been shut down? At 15 years? At 20 years?
Jesus Christ, it worked perfectly for 25 years before it got hit by a fucking tidal wave and a major earthquake in a 1-2 combo punch. When they came up with the plant design, they asked themselves, "what's the absolute worst thing we can think of?" and designed against that with a good safety margin. Just like the Twin Towers were designed to be rammed by a 707 and still stand, then got hit by something even bigger (and the conspiracy theorists still think it was an inside job because of the construction materials & methods. Me, I'm thinkin somebody might've cheated on the materials after the first inspections).
While nuclear can be done safely, there seems to be no effort to do so - as it would deny environmentalists a chance to remake the power grid in their own way.
Nuclear isn't done so much in the US because of litigation. The instant somebody announces they're going to be looking at building a nuke plant anywhere, the lawyers come out from the rocks and start burying the courts in paperwork, trying for injunctions to stop any and all nuclear construction.
Nuclear plants are expensive. They wouldn't be nearly as expensive if it weren't for the legal fees associated with the word 'nuclear'. When you have an activist-lawyer go in front of a camera and say "The only phisics I know is Ex-Lax', you know you're dealing with idiots.
Just read the history of the Perry Nuclear Plant. Most of the 'construction time', the plant was idle, nothing was moving due to the injunctions. They weren't even allowed to do maintanance on what they already had up, so when the injunctions lifted, they got the construction crews in there to inspect 100% and replace anything that even LOOKED like it had a rust spot, or they wouldn'tve received their operating license. And they had to keep full construction crews on the payroll even while they were waiting for the injunctions to crawl through the courts because if they didn't, the crews would vaporise off to other jobs with no guarantee of getting them back. Half the time they just barely got through with the inspection and maint before they got hit with yet another injunction. The lawyers made tons of money on that project.
All told, Perry cost $6 billion and took 9 years to build, mostly due to the injunctions. They never did finish the #2 Unit because of cash flow problems from all the litigation. Even though all but the containment vessel is done for #2, they stopped construction on it in '85 & 'abandoned' it in '94. They still have to do maintanance on the empty building in order to keep their license to operate since it's considerted legally to be 'one complex'. It could have gone online with both reactors at half the cost and within 3 years of groundbreaking if it wasn't for all the injunctions.
The people who think that nuclear power can be affordable and safe at the same time are drinking the Kool-aid.
"It's not safe now, so why bother developing something that is safe?" My ghost will remember this when my grandkids are freezing cause they can't afford to buy heating oil at any price.
On the other hand, technologic research is, you know, that thingie about advancement of civilization and then, is terribly doubtful because everything we currently know about the physical world around us, that there's any source of energy with more potential than nuclear (both fission and fussion) with the exception, maybe, of matter/antimatter reaction which is practically science fiction right now.
What little antimatter that's been produced (and we're talking femtograms here) has been expensive as hell to make. Think the world GDP to make a couple grams, it's within an order or 2 of magnitude of that IIRC. Definitely not gonna make any difference in any conceivable timeframe. And besides, the process we use to create those random femtograms is very energy-intensive, we're not within 6 orders of magnitude of breakeven yet.
That number was conjured up by blaming every incident of cancer in Europe on Chernobyl. It's like those new antismoking ads on American tv these days that flat out tell you you'll need a trach tube & stoma or start losing body parts the instant you start smoking. Now, I've been smoking for almost 45 years, and I probably wouldn't even have a bit of bronchitis if I'd cut back down to a pack a day from the 3 I smoke currently, and move my ass outta northeast Ohio (some of the worst air on the planet for particulate matter, thank you, CEI!!).
The trouble with Hydro power is the disasters are so bad, and sooner or later the dams get privatized and some wealthy jackass cuts funding to safety.
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
Um, no, actually, we've already built all the 'big hydro' we can, there's nothing left (in the developed world, not so much in China) to dam up. Trust me, if there was an undeveloped hydro site, they'd be falling all overthemselves to develop it.
We have now received the first open promise of a military strike against a US military base by our former cold war opponent and current occasional ally as a result of a military doctrine pushed by Obama and Clinton.
And Bush Jr.
The more I look at American politics, the more I'm convinced the GOP deliberately threw the 2008 election in order guarantee GOP control for another generation. Gods help us if we fall for that, and Gods give us some real candidates someday for a change.
It is rare for a person to get to the level of education that whitehouse staff do and believe in a litteral, activist god. Bush might have been an exception, but the people around him were not.
Staff, yeah, maybe even their top advisors, but that doesn't stop an idiot that looks good on TV from getting elected. El Presidente is pretty much a meat puppet position these days with half a dozen hands up his ass fighting for control. As long as he knows when to smile for the cameras and parrot the Party line, he's golden.
Of course, that doesn't stop the staffers from having agendas of their own, and in their position, they have the power and influence to 'make it so'.
I'll start with the easy one, Afghanistan. Remember 9-11? Remember who was the most responsible for that? Yeah, that Bin Laden guy. Do you know where he was? That's right! Afghanistan. When we asked nicely for the Taliban to hand him over, they balked. So, we assisted the Northern Alliance in defeating them.
So we were told by CNN that bin-Laden was responsible something like 20 minutes after the 2nd plane hit. I was watching the newscast on CNN when they mentioned once that a Special Forces team working in Afghanistan had phoned home saying they had bin-Laden in view, and should we throw rocks at him until you can get a battalion of Rangers over here to arrest him? The SF team was pulled back and set 200 miles away to start training the 'Northern Alliance'. (Truth be told, they were an 'alliance' only in that all groups involved hated the Taliban for controlling the capital.) Keep in mind also that the situation in 2001 in Afghanistan was simular to 1970 Cambodia. The royal family/Taliban held the capital and maybe a stone's throw past city limits, the Khmer Rouge/everybody else controlled everything else. We asked the Taliban to turn over bin-Laden and they said 'We can't do it'. Not 'We won't do it', 'We can't do it.' As in, there was no way they could send troops 350 miles away into enemy territory and reasonably expect them to come back mission accomplished. Just wasn't gonna happen, and having been in this situation since the Soviets left, they knew it.
Add to that, one of the Russians' big plan in the 80's was to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean to pipe oil from Siberia. For one thing, the weather was better than in Arkangelsk (for obvious reasons [the Chinese], they didn't want to put any pipeline further south) if they went for an internal pipeline to the Pacific coast. And have you experienced weather in the north Pacific? It seriously sucks in the winter! So what happens after the 'unification' (yeah, right) of Afghanistan? The Russians sign a deal to build that pipeline as soon as people stop shooting at each other. (Like that'll happen any time soon!)
I'll not go into how 'al-Qaeda' really started (Hint: Think FBI probe of the 1998 WTC bomb attempt and the RICO Act.) and the fact that power-wise, bin-Laden was pretty much out of the loop. The only thing going for him in 2001 was his checks stopped bouncing for a change.
So Saddam threatened to kill Bush Sr. Take it in context. In the 80's, the Iraqis were fighting the Iranians, and the US was supplying the Iraqis. They were our 'good guys', until the US pulled the plug on the cash and closed up the toybox. The war pretty much petered out after that. Of course Saddam was pissed, he was looking forward to adding Iran to Iraq, make it one big Persian state, and the US just welshed on the deal. The US has never been for Arab unity, it threatens Israel. We like Arab oil and Israeli sovereignty. Walking the razor's edge is a bitch.
Sure. As far as they actually want dollars. The more you print, the less they want.
Which they will, so long as oil is traded in dollars worldwide. The biggest threat to the US economy and the strength of the dollar is not debt, it's dollar-traded commodities settling on another currency.
The Iranians were talking a few years back about openning up an oil bourse that traded in euros, not dollars. The US reaction was, shall we say, unthrilled. It was pre-9/11, IIRC, and I don't know if they ever pulled it off, but if they do try pulling something like that now, expect an invasion within a month or so, especiall since the euro went from $0.95(?) per euro to $1.32 per euro. That's a big move.
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With some of the members of the only reasonably 'intelligent' species I know personally, that wouldn't be such a bad idea.
This.
The problem with trying to fix the system from the inside is, once you're inside, you have a vested interest in keeping the system as is. Yes, it's broken, but the only people who can fix it are getting reelected due specifically to those campaign contributions from those high powered lobbyists and super-pacs. It's a classic case of 'who will bell the cat?'
Nor is there any real substantial access to matching Federal funds available to any 3rd Party candidate. If you're not a Republicrat (and I use that word to mean both wings of the Party, Democrat and Republican, it's all the same anymore except for transient soundbyte generating fluff disguised as Vital Issues), you're pretty much out of the consideration, especially when the Party keeps saying 'If you vote 3rd party, you're wasting your vote!! Vote for us instead!'
With zero options, and the Party finally being upfront about it, the 88% just doesn't vote anymore, they're smart enough to know there are no real choices, just different sets of meat puppets with the same set of hands up their asses.
Or that said atoms are created by solar fusion in a long dead star. Gotta love their faces when you explain it to them and follow it up with 'So, how's it feel to be nuclear waste?'
Chinese coal plants aren't as heavily regulated as Japanese or American coal plants. They're due west of Japan, and the wind blows right over it. And the Chinese never signed the Kyoto Accords.
OK, that firehose article is here: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=5976963
Holy shit, 2009???? I don't remember it being THAT far back...
The solar wind blows 100% of the time. It's called 'outgassing' from the sun. Not a lot of it, you couldn't move a pinwheel with it, but it's there.
Yeah, when I read that article before I submitted it, I was wondering how they intended to pull it off cheaply enough to make it work. I didn't see a thing in the proposal about using asteroidal/lunar materials. Still, it's a bold plan, and if anybody could pull it off, the Japanese can.
IIRC (been awhile since I've read the article, so don't quote me), they were planning on floating the rectenna in the ocean someplace off the coast. Not a bad idea.
So if the risk isn't zero, don't do it ever? You can have a heart attack in bed, does this mean we should ban beds, too?
Yes, things will crop up all the time, and just not in nuclear powerplants. To use my favorite example, the Perry power plant had a small lubrication fire in a pump bearing, easily controlled, the fire was out and the pump replaced in a matter of hours, the lights didn't even dim in Cleveland. The 'no nuke' people wanted an immediate shutdown and dismantlement of the entire plant, even though there was no real danger, the place wasn't gonna explode, and the pump in question had nothing to do with cooling the reactor itself.
No, I'm saying the earthquake/tsunami combo was a 1-2 combo punch. Keep in mind also that both the earthquake and the tsunami were pretty big events in their own rights, and more destructive than such events usually are. The plant would have survived either, which was reported at the time, just not the two together. Neither event is so common that you could expect them to happen on a regular basis, thus the combo was so outside the box, they considered the risk so microscopic, they didn't plan for the combo. It's like predicting you'll have a heart attack and a simultaneous stroke on a daily 15 minute commute on the freeway that causes you to ram a propane truck causing an explosion that rips a bigass hole in the bridge you just happen to be crossing and kills a bunch of people. What are the odds? Way slim, 1 in a million, maybe, or we'd be hearing about that exact thing all the time. Granted, the odds aren't zero. But they're not inevitable, either.
You still use some electricity to run the thermostat & blowers. Just ask any HVAC tech. Even gas furnaces aren't pressure-fed, you need a blower to move that hot air into the ducts & into the house. Blowers work on electricity.
IIRC, that was one of the reasons for the attack on Pearl Harbor that got the US involved in WW2 when the Americans decided to cut petroleum and metals imports to Japan in order to slow them down a bit in their war effort in China. Of course, I was taught that 45 years ago back in the Stoned Age of the 60's in high school, they obviously teach more politically correct points of view these days, judging from the history texts I read when my kids were in high school.
They let most of their reactors run over the winter to provide the needed power. Now they're trying to cut useage by 15% because their baseline capacity has shrunk significantly. They're trying to bring their old coal plants back online to make up some of that capacity, and they still predict rolling blackouts in 2-3 months when the summer weather cycle hits. Then things will cool down a bit and winter will hit. The fun in Japan is just starting.
An economy needs business and production to keep moving. Production needs energy. Where are they going to get this energy to sustain what they have, let alone increase their production? 'Alternative energy' sounds nice, No way it can handle a baseload, it's too unreliable. The only place with 100% sunshine 100% of the time is in space. Same with the wind.
A few months ago, I posted a story about Japan wanting to put a solar power satellite in orbit by 2020. It's way down in the stack now, and it was pre-tsunami, so it's been awhile. If they can hang half a dozen SPSes delivering 10 MW each to the ground, they wouldn't need their nuke plants unless they wanted to meet the 20% reduction in emissions they promised to make by 2020. The SPSes were part of that original plan.
Here in the States, there's been some interest in hanging SPS rectennas in the Mojave Desert so they'd be close to California where the power will be needed. Environmentalist lawyers started screaming about 'living in a microwave oven' and it never got out of the planning stages.
IIRC, the LMFRB design was pushed because of the usefulness of one of its waste products - Pu-239, very handy for things that fly very far very fast and go boom very loudly with lottsa damage.
Jesus Christ, it worked perfectly for 25 years before it got hit by a fucking tidal wave and a major earthquake in a 1-2 combo punch. When they came up with the plant design, they asked themselves, "what's the absolute worst thing we can think of?" and designed against that with a good safety margin. Just like the Twin Towers were designed to be rammed by a 707 and still stand, then got hit by something even bigger (and the conspiracy theorists still think it was an inside job because of the construction materials & methods. Me, I'm thinkin somebody might've cheated on the materials after the first inspections).
Nuclear isn't done so much in the US because of litigation. The instant somebody announces they're going to be looking at building a nuke plant anywhere, the lawyers come out from the rocks and start burying the courts in paperwork, trying for injunctions to stop any and all nuclear construction.
Nuclear plants are expensive. They wouldn't be nearly as expensive if it weren't for the legal fees associated with the word 'nuclear'. When you have an activist-lawyer go in front of a camera and say "The only phisics I know is Ex-Lax', you know you're dealing with idiots.
Just read the history of the Perry Nuclear Plant. Most of the 'construction time', the plant was idle, nothing was moving due to the injunctions. They weren't even allowed to do maintanance on what they already had up, so when the injunctions lifted, they got the construction crews in there to inspect 100% and replace anything that even LOOKED like it had a rust spot, or they wouldn'tve received their operating license. And they had to keep full construction crews on the payroll even while they were waiting for the injunctions to crawl through the courts because if they didn't, the crews would vaporise off to other jobs with no guarantee of getting them back. Half the time they just barely got through with the inspection and maint before they got hit with yet another injunction. The lawyers made tons of money on that project.
All told, Perry cost $6 billion and took 9 years to build, mostly due to the injunctions. They never did finish the #2 Unit because of cash flow problems from all the litigation. Even though all but the containment vessel is done for #2, they stopped construction on it in '85 & 'abandoned' it in '94. They still have to do maintanance on the empty building in order to keep their license to operate since it's considerted legally to be 'one complex'. It could have gone online with both reactors at half the cost and within 3 years of groundbreaking if it wasn't for all the injunctions.
"It's not safe now, so why bother developing something that is safe?" My ghost will remember this when my grandkids are freezing cause they can't afford to buy heating oil at any price.
What little antimatter that's been produced (and we're talking femtograms here) has been expensive as hell to make. Think the world GDP to make a couple grams, it's within an order or 2 of magnitude of that IIRC. Definitely not gonna make any difference in any conceivable timeframe. And besides, the process we use to create those random femtograms is very energy-intensive, we're not within 6 orders of magnitude of breakeven yet.
That number was conjured up by blaming every incident of cancer in Europe on Chernobyl. It's like those new antismoking ads on American tv these days that flat out tell you you'll need a trach tube & stoma or start losing body parts the instant you start smoking. Now, I've been smoking for almost 45 years, and I probably wouldn't even have a bit of bronchitis if I'd cut back down to a pack a day from the 3 I smoke currently, and move my ass outta northeast Ohio (some of the worst air on the planet for particulate matter, thank you, CEI!!).
Um, no, actually, we've already built all the 'big hydro' we can, there's nothing left (in the developed world, not so much in China) to dam up. Trust me, if there was an undeveloped hydro site, they'd be falling all overthemselves to develop it.
And Bush Jr.
The more I look at American politics, the more I'm convinced the GOP deliberately threw the 2008 election in order guarantee GOP control for another generation. Gods help us if we fall for that, and Gods give us some real candidates someday for a change.
Not hoping for much, am I?
Staff, yeah, maybe even their top advisors, but that doesn't stop an idiot that looks good on TV from getting elected. El Presidente is pretty much a meat puppet position these days with half a dozen hands up his ass fighting for control. As long as he knows when to smile for the cameras and parrot the Party line, he's golden.
Of course, that doesn't stop the staffers from having agendas of their own, and in their position, they have the power and influence to 'make it so'.
So we were told by CNN that bin-Laden was responsible something like 20 minutes after the 2nd plane hit. I was watching the newscast on CNN when they mentioned once that a Special Forces team working in Afghanistan had phoned home saying they had bin-Laden in view, and should we throw rocks at him until you can get a battalion of Rangers over here to arrest him? The SF team was pulled back and set 200 miles away to start training the 'Northern Alliance'. (Truth be told, they were an 'alliance' only in that all groups involved hated the Taliban for controlling the capital.) Keep in mind also that the situation in 2001 in Afghanistan was simular to 1970 Cambodia. The royal family/Taliban held the capital and maybe a stone's throw past city limits, the Khmer Rouge/everybody else controlled everything else. We asked the Taliban to turn over bin-Laden and they said 'We can't do it'. Not 'We won't do it', 'We can't do it.' As in, there was no way they could send troops 350 miles away into enemy territory and reasonably expect them to come back mission accomplished. Just wasn't gonna happen, and having been in this situation since the Soviets left, they knew it.
Add to that, one of the Russians' big plan in the 80's was to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean to pipe oil from Siberia. For one thing, the weather was better than in Arkangelsk (for obvious reasons [the Chinese], they didn't want to put any pipeline further south) if they went for an internal pipeline to the Pacific coast. And have you experienced weather in the north Pacific? It seriously sucks in the winter! So what happens after the 'unification' (yeah, right) of Afghanistan? The Russians sign a deal to build that pipeline as soon as people stop shooting at each other. (Like that'll happen any time soon!)
I'll not go into how 'al-Qaeda' really started (Hint: Think FBI probe of the 1998 WTC bomb attempt and the RICO Act.) and the fact that power-wise, bin-Laden was pretty much out of the loop. The only thing going for him in 2001 was his checks stopped bouncing for a change.
So Saddam threatened to kill Bush Sr. Take it in context. In the 80's, the Iraqis were fighting the Iranians, and the US was supplying the Iraqis. They were our 'good guys', until the US pulled the plug on the cash and closed up the toybox. The war pretty much petered out after that. Of course Saddam was pissed, he was looking forward to adding Iran to Iraq, make it one big Persian state, and the US just welshed on the deal. The US has never been for Arab unity, it threatens Israel. We like Arab oil and Israeli sovereignty. Walking the razor's edge is a bitch.
The Iranians were talking a few years back about openning up an oil bourse that traded in euros, not dollars. The US reaction was, shall we say, unthrilled. It was pre-9/11, IIRC, and I don't know if they ever pulled it off, but if they do try pulling something like that now, expect an invasion within a month or so, especiall since the euro went from $0.95(?) per euro to $1.32 per euro. That's a big move.