Thanks Don,

You state that:
"In the United States, the vast majority of people seem to be under the impression that democracy and capitalism are the same thing, and neither the school system (emphasizing the positive aspects of American history and de-emphasizing the negative), nor the government, nor the corporations want them to be disabused of the idea."

If that indeed is the case then it is a damning indictment of your education system.

I worry about people who use the word "real" a great deal, and it causes me to look very closely at what bill of goods they are trying to sell.

- "...the real reasons the U.S. is in Iraq
- "...a real penchant for missing points"
- "...what is really going on in the world"

I would gladly just settle for the actual reasons, and what is actually going on. "Real" always hints of a "political" slant on what ever follows.

I consider my self lucky in that I have never been a member of a political party and my thinking is not coloured by any subsequent political bias. You would have to look long and hard to find anyone as a-political.

I am avidly keen on the study of history and have been taught to look at things from many angles, taking in what ever background may affect the perspective from each particular angle.

I object when people trot out illogical, irrational opinions and report them as fact, expecting everyone to accept them as such without the slightest question. The party line far too often on this forum seems based on "Liberal-Good; Republican-Bad; mutter, mutter, Bush & Co stole the 2000 election; mutter, mutter, democracy is dead in the United States, we don't have a President, we have a Resident, mutter, mutter, I hate the bastard so every thing he does is wrong, bad, evil."

Which of course is a complete and absolute load of bollocks, things just aren't that black and white. Which makes the above attitude totally illogical - totally irrational. It is in countering that, that I may appear to regard the Bush administration as being, "only slightly below the Throne of God". They have made their fair share of mistakes, but then show me someone, or some organisation that hasn't.

Regarding the sense of history that I seem to need so badly - I have enough of a knowledge of history to realise that there has been hardly a policy in the world that hasn't been formulated on lies, deception and double-dealing. The only variables are degree and intent. Why should you expect this one to be any different.

When folks on this forum list all the misdeeds of successive U.S. administrations and denounce what evil they have inflicted upon the world in general. Running back through the years, their knowledge and sense of history conveniently forgets the "cold war" and the weird, and at times ruthless, little game of chess it caused to be played out. They blithely apply today's conditions and enlightened thinking to yesteryear's circumstances and "from the hip" condemn outright. They have obviously forgotten what a tight-rope act it was.

Your example of American perfidity, The School of the Americas, had a counter-part in Moscow, if memory serves it was called "The Patrice Lomumba (sp?) University" that's were all the foreign pro-Soviet-Communist terrorist were trained. Two wrong things don't make one right - but you have to live in the world you are born in - being pragmatic gets you through it, which means you do what you have to - that sometimes breeds strange bed-fellows. Remember Stalin's Soviet Russia and Churchill's Imperial Britain in 1941, they were our allies for damn near six months before the U.S. came in. Had that alliance not been forged through forced circumstances the Second World War might well have been lost.

Talking about, "ignoring details that you find inconvenient," :

". . . what Dr. Blix and his inspectors found." Isn't it a matter of what they didn't find? Or are you having short-term memory problems?"

- Al-Samoud II missile system under development that was proscribed by earlier UN resolution.
- CB munitions that Iraq had declared they had none of.

It's not my short-term memory that is suffering.

On this whole Iraq business, Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to retain power. If as many say he didn't have any WMD or capability to develop, or deliver them, why didn't he just come out and say so and provide UNMOVIC with the means to verify that claim? On this the good Dr. Blix was only leaning towards the conclusion that the Iraqi's had nothing late summer this year. That would have stopped the war dead in it's tracks.

I also like to question things that appear odd - remember those "mobile labs" that were found, and the unbridled glee that rang out through this forum when it transpired that the function of those trucks was to generate hydrogen for artillery met balloons, and that joy of joys, they had been purchased from the UK.

Not one person on this forum doubted those revalations, not one person questioned where they were found (certainly not near any artillery unit), not one person questioned why they were stripped bare, yet remained almost surgically clean, not one person made comment on the similarity in requirements for generating hydrogen and applications relating to the handling of CB agents.