Meet your new thread, same as the old thread.

[Cletus Miller]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Heathrow apparently has the most international travelers, if not the most passengers total. Hub maybe implies that it has a lot of people stopping there en route to other places;

Right, but since many (most?) of the flights at Balad carry only the crew of the plane (and often a very small crew, as with the cited F-16), a comparison between Balad and an airport based on the number of passengers is nonsense.

the busier airports may have people actually wanting to stay in the location they land.

There are people who want to stay in Iraq?

Originally posted by Ty I think you're jumping to the conclusion that cracks in the runway pose a short-term safety problem. I read that article and infer that the cracks pose no short-term problem, and that the decision to fix them speaks to planning for the long-term.

Sure, I probably am. But that's not a place to be wrong. And, wouldn't a non-US-occupied Iraq need an air force base? And isn't one thing we're supposed to be doing over there rebuilding stuff we broke?

In any case, does anyone really believe that maintaining an airbase hasn't always been part of the plan? Even if we had been greeted as liberators, the oil revenue had been enough to pay for US costs AND completely rebuild the entire country into a modern Garden of Eden and the Iraqi Republican party won a free and open election with over 90% of the vote and established a pro-Western, pro-Israeli, perfect libertarian government and their shining example lead the rest of the mid-east (and Pakistan) to follow their lead and even OBL saw the light and turned himself in? Of course there would still be a US AFB on Iraqi soil--in that neo-con fantasy, tho, the Iraqis would have insisted on our staying and paid us to stay to thank us for freeing them from tyranny.