Don't quibble over semantics, Teribus. When I say Bush is "planning" on war, I don't mean hypothetical military strategies. Bush is going to get a lot of young men killed if he can get away with it because he's hung up on Iraq. Whether the reason is oil or Daddy's war or his everlasting rhetoric on "evil," I don't know, but hung up he is. Iraq is hardly the biggest threat to America right now, but it IS a convenient one.

It's utter nonesense to say that America has no enemies, but the conservative lot can't see to get it through their head -- despite the rhetoric -- that those enemies are no longer other countries that we can use conventional tactics against. Our typical tactic is a massive bombing from the air (civilian casualties aren't accidents when they are planned), followed by finding some local warlord to mop up in return for being allowed to get away with the same atrocities as the previous regime, as long as he pretends to like America for a while.

"Pre-emptive strikes" (another word for killing whomever you want to without adequate reason) will never make America safer; quite the contrary. They will only perpetuate the cycle of violence and draw more men and women into hating America -- the kind of men and women who have nothing left to lose and would rather die killing Americans than slowly die of some preventable, curable disease or beg for crumbs to feed their children because the bombing has collapsed their economy and they can't find a job.

Americans, in general, have this hubris about American motives and American actions. Someone how it's okay when our military does gruesome things, because we're America. We must be right, because we're America. Those fools should give in because we'll crush them otherwise, and it's okay to kill foreigners, because they aren't American. The American ideals that we hold so dear rarely survive past our own borders, and most Americans are too wrapped up in their sense of superiority to even notice.

It's because we are so big and powerful that we must think MORE globally, act MORE carefully, and behave ALWAYS as we would wish ourselves to be treated inside our own borders.