Help me out here... I'm trying to understand something. I'll try my best not to offend.

Puplava and guests speak incessantly about credit woes. Americans in general speak about the various credit instruments and how they masked a bubble in the real estate market.

Bubbles in the real estate market in the U.S. are normal. It seems to me that Americans are in denial.

The real issue is the war in Iraq, and the military economy of the U.S. in general. I never hear honest assesments of how much the war costs. If anything, the current credit dilemma is just a sign of the (hundreds?) of trillions pumped into the occupation of Iraq.

Someone please correct me with numbers. But I think 500 billion in real estate loans and 3 billion in bond losses are nothing compared to the costs of the war.

Most military spending in high tech fields ends up in a dead end. It doesn't get re-circulated in the economy. I remember reading a research report back in the 1980's that showed 8 jobs could be created in the civilian sector for every job in the military. How much would it be now? Tanks and jets aren't getting cheaper.

So the real solution to the current economic dilemma? 1) Get the H*** out of Iraq. As soon as possible. 2) Reign in military spending. Until those two things happen, nothing will get better.

I may be naive here, but what I see is the U.S. government not learning a thing from Vietnam, and the rest seems to be a smoke screen.

I'm not a peacenik, and I hope I haven't offended anyone affected by Iraq. But it makes no financial sense whatsoever to me.

The best predictor of where the markets are going, and where gold is going, is not this credit stuff. It's the war in Iraq.

MR