Thanks Jed, and I agree with you. My characterization of our stopping the ground war when we did "for fairly arbitrary reasons" was probably not entirely accurate; as you say, we were a member of a coalition, and some of our partners felt pretty strongly about the need to stop once Iraq had been driven out of Kuwait. Like you, I think it might have been better if we had pushed the envelope of coalition unity a little more than we did on that issue. I also think that we were a little too willing to assume that the regime of weapons inspections, etc. would continue to have the support of the international community; with the benefit of hindsight, that assumption seems kind of naive, although our desire to believe in it was understadable under the circumstances.

Also, it's only fair to recognize that we had some very legitimate concerns about leaving a power vaccuum in Iraq if we did topple Saddam. We have similar concerns about Afghanistan, but we are being more proactive about it this time -- maybe that means we're still capable of learning.

Like you, I think we need to stay engaged in the quest for a peaceful solution to the Israel/Palestine mess, or it will continue to create huge problems for us and everyone else in the world. On this issue I'll give GWB credit for learning from his mistakes; we have re-inserted ourselves into this process now, and we sure don't hear Bush disparaging "nation-building" these days like he did in last year's election campaign. Let's hope we'll all continue to get better at this as we go forward.