We are hypocrites without a conscience. No doubt, why we Americans are despised so much. Might was never right and its high time, we realized this.

We are hypocrites without a conscience. No doubt, why we Americans are despised so much. Might was never right and its high time, we realized this.

But!, but!, then we wouldn't have all the nifty new laws and alphabet agencies that have popped up since 2001. Let's see, there's the Patriot Act, all the great wire and electronic surveillance, FISA, bank reporting; pretty much everything…. but border control. Kinda makes ya wonder about the nutters' previous claims.

(Disagree on the flower power, though.)

Even the Africa policy has a “yeah, but” attached to it–the fact that US money goes to abstinence programs, but not to condom promotion. Still, the program undoubtedly is doing an enormous amount of good, so credit is due.

I don't know about your belief that folks don't back continued efforts in Afghanistan. I do think you're right that many (relatively uninformed) people, when they hear about it, think, “We're still there?” But there's a difference between that and opposition. I think pretty much everybody just wishes Bush had taken care of business there in the first place.

To me, the misuse of Colin Powell is a real tragedy–a great man turned into a show pony for really, really bad policies. Condi's a puppet. It's a good thing she's “retiring” from public life, if that's truly what she's doing.

Bush has done a lot of nasty stuff, but most of it would be forgotten by history if not for his three or four really disastrous failures (Iraq, torture, Katrina, and the general politicization of “homeland security”). Those, however, are four colossal fuck-ups. We can only hope that al Qaeda won't regroup enough to lay a fifth one at his feet.

I appreciate your compliments about my relative forthrightness in giving credit where it's due–though I probably just threw all that out the window with my litany of Bush failings…

I applaud you for sticking to your beliefs but also rightly praising Bush for his African relief efforts. Most far left folks when asked about that will just say “well how about Iraq?” and refuse to say anything good about the man. He's not a monster who goes around killing little babies on weekends and plotting world destruction, but if you only listened to the far left, that's what you get. The far right did the same to Clinton in the 90s. To me, Bush has done some things right, but the Iraq debacle – the worst US foreign policy disaster in a long long time – will be his legacy. He blew it and then tried covering it up. Imagine what he could have had as a legacy – liberating 10 million women in Afghanistan from a regime that wouldn't allow them to go to school or even expose their faces in public (N.O.W. would never give him credit for that, he's a monster), having African American Secretaries of State for his entire 8 year reign (NAACP will just say “but they're Uncle Toms”), record foreign aid to Africa (NAACP will say “no comment, he's a monster”), getting Libya to give up a nuclear program and having North Korea destroy Youngbon through diplomacy. IMHO, if you take away Iraq he'd be a middle of the road pres who just happens to talk funny and often lsounds kinda dumb. Hell, but Stephen Hawking isn't to eloquent in front of a camera either is he, but he's pretty smart.

I think Bush will go to his grave regretting Iraq and thinking how much better his legacy could have been. And he should.

Imagine the world today that would have resulted from our capturing Osama and decimating al Qaeda in 2001-03 (while respecting American values, by the way), and then pouring just a fraction of a single year's Iraq-War budget into an intensive campaign to improve the lives of people in the Muslim world and burnish the image of the United States over there. For approximately the same amount of money Bush now wants to commit to African AIDS relief (for which I applaud him), we could have worked with Middle Eastern governments to build hundreds of schools, improve roads and other transportation, modernize agriculture, etc., etc., etc. The benefits would have been enormous, both for those countries and for us.

Anti-Western extremism will be eradicated, in the long run, not by imposing democracy at the point of a gun, but by encouraging and helping to facilitate the development of societies that don't breed terrorists. So, yeah, I would have put a boot up the Taliban's ass (to misquote Toby Keith)…but then I would have removed said boot and inserted a flower.

I believe I was like many folks in that time: I distrusted Poppy Bush's motives and intentions; I despised the jingoism of my fellow citizens before, during and after the war, as well as the government's attempts to market the war by incessantly using the catchphrase “Desert Storm”; I hated the idea of a single Iraqi civilian death, much less as many as there were (and, really, who knows?); and I was uncomfortable that we knew so much more about the oil we were over there to liberate than about the people of Kuwait.

However, all that said, I could not (and still cannot) shake the nagging sense that this was a war that had to be fought and that Saddam's aggression needed to be overturned. There's can't help but be a lot of moral questions about wars that involve a lot of low-stakes (for your own side), high-potential-for-damage-and-death (on the other side) air bombings; perhaps it would have been more moral to launch a ground war immediately in Iraq, so that (hopefully) only troops would be fighting and dying. But that's not really the nature of wars anymore, and it's doubtful the coalition nations would have put up with a large number of combat deaths.

One other thing: Bush 41 didn't invade Iraq during the Gulf War; in retrospect, he sure looks like a genius on that score.

Thanks again for your view.

Besides, what does low casualty mean? Around 200000 iraqis died during the first gulf war and mostly in the incessant Air Raids. Even conservative righwing neocon groups admit to a Iraqi deathcount of 20000 to 30000 deaths. These were real people, fathers, mothers, childrens, husbands.. who died for no reason. The US -UK led coalition even bombed schools, orphanages and hospitals. I was a volunteer who spent more than 2 months on the ground and it was sheer madness.