Rabbi Tzali Freedman, from Oak Park, MI, sent me the following article. It is a wonderful lesson, written by the great Victor Davis Hanson, on how history really does repeat itself, and will continue to do so, if we do not learn from it. Here's a brief sample:

About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success — and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences — resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.

Pre-invasion intelligence — despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings — had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like. How can you spend months spying out everything from beach sand to tidal currents and not invest a second into investigating the nature of the tank terrain a few miles from the beach? The horrific result was that the Allies were utterly unprepared for the disaster to come — and died by the thousands in the boscage of June and July.

You can read the entire article -- HERE.

I wish everyone who has an opinion of our conflict in Iraq, and the rest of the world, could read this. Thanks, Tzali!

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Spoke to the doctor yesterday (saw him Thursday). He gave me a clean bill of health - relatively speaking - and the OK to have surgery on my stomach (hernia - which makes me look 8 months pregnant).
 
Also, my kidney's seem to be stable, but I am still anemic, although this has improved a bit as well.
 
The doctor also talked to me about the cause of my organ rejection in September. Apparently, it was much worse than I thought. He said that if I had not gone in to see him, when I did (well, actually, I went to the ER), the damage to my heart would have been irreversible. As it was, the kidney malfunction was caused by the rejection. According to Dr. Anderson, the rejection was caused by my medical team in New York. They decided I only needed one type of anti-rejection medication (Gengraf), after 6 months. However, many doctors, including Dr. Anderson, disagree. The NY team took me off CellCept, in June 2003.
 
However, upon discovering the rejection, Dr. Anderson immediately put me back on it.