I have a couple questions I keep asking myself, and I figure that I'll just post them here and hope someone smarter than me will answer them:
- If the Shia in Iraq don't trust the mostly Sunni military and the Sunni don't trust the mostly Shia police forces, why not make them work together in a joint task force so there are both Shia and Sunni together, and each group can make sure the other isn't acting as a death squad?
- The world thinks that the Afghani poppy crop is a problem that requires massive amounts of intervention and money and the destruction of the plants to prevent the production of heroin. Rather than spend money to destroy the crop and time to convince the farmers they shouldn't grow the only thing that's remotly profitable, why not get them to start converting it into biodiesel? The produce so much poppy seed there that they should be able to yield some significant amount of biodiesel, hopefully enough to respark their economy and help the farmers live free from the influence of the warlords who finance themselves via heroin? Imagine, they could potentially become one of the larger suppliers of diesel to China. Let's do some math quick. This site says that opium poppies yield 124 US gallons/acre and the NY Times reports that there were 321,235 acres of poppy planted in Afghanistan in 2004. That's 39,833,264 US gallons of biodiesel on a conservative estimate. While that's only 10% of the total daily US consumption of oil, it's a significant amount of money for the company, More than $101,000,000 at current US prices for a gallon of diesel. Again, it's just a thought.
Great suggestions!