The only problem I see with your foreign policy is that you have to decide where to set the “what percentage of the population has to ask for help before we go in against the wishes of the rest of them?” threshold. That could be tricky.

Of course, I doubt that any reasonable person would have set the threshold low enough to justify the Iraq invasion.

Seriously though. The way most countries have been messed up in the past (Colonies in Africa, Asia, Middle-East) has been through other countries (GB, USA, Russia etc.) going in to ‘fix’ things. No country sees itself as evil or corrupt. So each one has invaded, occupied and colonized with the best intentions. In Africa it was ‘civilizing’ the ’savages’ for their own good. In Afghanistan and Iraq it is ‘democratizing’ them for their own good. We’ve been meddling in the Middle-East for centuries now and the mess there is our ancestors fault as much as Bush’s. Whatever the intentions meddling in other people’s countries almost always results in a mess, with the cost being borne by the meddlee and not the meddlers.

Everyone, countries included, is responsible for their own growth and development in life. In psychology this is called individuation. I’m sure there are many synonymous terms in Geo-Political parlance. Often the best thing we can do for someone is to leave them alone to heal and grow, even if they are more screwed up now then they were before we tried to ‘help’ them in the first place. Which is not to say we cannot provide help when it is sought, but telling people how to live and govern their own country is not help as I understand the word.

“Live and let live” is the global foreign policy I dream of, but I’m not going to invade your country to convince you that it’s the right way to go

When Paul said, “worthless opinions have little value,” which is a meaningless tautology in itself, I think he meant “uninformed opinions have little value”.

This year one kid here is getting a ‘Dora’ TV/DVD, and another (1.5 years old) is getting the same but in a spongebob outer case….

TV/DVD players are cheap; bomb’m with that and a hundred prerecorded DVDs and you don’t worry about the reception problem…

Paul: Yes, I do agree with you, except you don’t need a passport or any other darn thing to state an opinion; everyone deserves one and has the right, if not duty, to express it.

By the way, I found a link to your claim about Korean chachis.

Paul: Yes, I agree. I almost mentioned something about how “this will happen over time anyway”. It’s true…as is all that other stuff you said. Staying there is only fueling more hatred, which is moving us all in the wrong direction.

I just thought we could speed it up some.

By calling what we did in Iraq “going to war”, we have insulted every excusable war we ever fought. If the USA will go to war when its borders have not been jeopardized by those we wish to kill, then the USA is either appointing itself sheriff of the world, or has another agenda. If the first, we are doomed to failure unless our strength is greater than the rest of the world’s combined strength. Unless we equate nuclear warheads to strength, that is not the case. If instead we are killing people who don’t look and talk like us because we have another agenda (guarantee that oil supplies will last until Cheney’s grand-children are retired?), it can only be a matter of time before the rest of the world punishes such selfishness.

It should be a necessary precursor to war is that the other guy has done something bad, and it was directed towards you. In this case, the sins and crimes committed by Sadam and his family were directed towards Iraqis, Iranis, Syrians, etc. When the USA declared war against Iraq, we had no righteous leg to stand on. We had not been harmed, so our justification for destroying Iraq’s infrastructure was non-existent. Having a few shreds of decency left causes us to appease our conscience by rebuilding that which we tear down. Because we have inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on the Iraqi people (more than Sadam had), they have no motivation to help us look good. No matter how much money we spend there, the Iraqi infrastructure will not be successfully rebuilt until it can be rebuilt by Iraqis spending their own money. This means that the USA, in order to allow Iraq to complete the process of re-becoming a self-sustainable country, must totally stop influencing Iraq through the use of military power. We should leave today. We should have learned in Vietnam that not pulling out because we should never have gone in is just plain wrong.

There is no doubt that the world is smaller now than 50 years ago, and shrinking every day. TV has done much of this, as have relatively cheap airfare, radio, telephones, and the internet. Given enough time (50 years?), we will all homogenize. If we pull out but don’t set up strong TV towers in Kuwait and elsewhere, what you describe will still happen - it will just take longer. I’ll vote for getting McDonalds and The Gap to fund TV towers near Iraq, but even if they don’t, those TV signals will find their way into Baghdad, and do their job, over time.

The main thing is, pull out, and let the healing begin.

And let’s not make the same mistake we did with the Koreans when we tried this with them. Remember when we found out that Chachi means ‘penis’ in Korean after we had been broadcasting “Joanie loves Chachi” for months. Well that peninsular has never been the same since.