At 01:13 AM 12/11/2004 -0800 Doug Pensinger wrote: >The more people we piss off, the greater the resources of our >enemies. >We might be the mightiest nation on the planet, but as our >failures in Iraq instruct us, we can't take on the whole world.
I am not convinced of this. In particular, the presence of anti-war sentiment in Europe and Latin America does not strike me as providing greater resources to our enemies. In particular, I don't see how the United States can be described as "taking on the whole world". Furthermore, I don't see how why the "lesson of Iraq" should cause us to ignore the "lesson of Kosovo", which suggested that we could, in fact, take on rogue States in the face of world opposition. >It's not really about getting France/Germany/whomever on board as much as >it is doing the _right_thing_ and inviting the rest of the world to help >if they wanted to do the right thing as well. And IMO, Iraq was never the >right thing. That's fine..... but as you know, I and many others believe that Iraq was one of the most right things the United States has done in a long time. Shouldn't you commend the Bush Administration then, for doing what they genuinely believed to be the right thing? After all, you clearly state here that the US should not want for French and German cooperation in acting upon "the right thing." In this case, the US spent nearly one and a half years attempting to persuade as many nations as possible that liberating Iraq was the "right thing", after which they decided to go in with the coalition available, rather than wait out another long Iraqi summer. That would seem to match the criteria you establish here. JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
