Tinker, my dear:
I write from an appartment in downtown New York, still with grey dust in the corners... I marched against the US giving mr. Husain weapons like gas before many on the right could point to Iraq on a map... This is no more about safety for the US than Cuba was about danger of a communist invation of Florida. This whole sillyness is to control the flow of oil away from China. How would I have done things differently? I would encourage a common market of China Japan and India as the industrial center in a partnership with the third world. Now, a down side for the comander in chimp, is that we would no longer get 70 percent of the worlds natural resourses, and so we could not afford to keep the three percent which gave birth to the Bush and Cheney family at the top of the pyramid... but, on the good side, the life expectancy as well as the standard of living for the rest of us would benifit by getting out from under the thumb of the military industrial complex. Fact is, I would rather have the safty of a decent living wage and health care than a big nucular terroist threat pointing at the rest of the world for my tax money.
Cheers
Larry