the tundrah blog

holy crap. this is the funniest thing i've read online in a loooong time. pulled from the Huff Post... a "projected" IM chat between G-Dub and President Fox of Mexico. so awesome....

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The President's Secret IMs: World Leaders Gone Wild "Cancun Edition"!

AIM chat with LZ0rr0
9:46 p.m.

Kickass43: el dudo!
Kickass43: chill tha odoulls...
Kickass43: & rev tha boogie bords!!
Kickass43: cuz its gna b time 4 wrld leadrs gon wild!
Kickass43: "cancun edishun!"
Kickass43: 8-)
Kickass43: si mi capitan?
Kickass43: uh vinny?
Kickass43: ola???

LZ0rr0: I am here Jorge.
LZ0rr0: Good evening to you.
LZ0rr0: I look forward to a fruitful and productive discussion...
LZ0rr0: between our two countries.
LZ0rr0: Also with our new amigo Esteban...
LZ0rr0: from Canada.
LZ0rr0: Such a history of tolerance...
LZ0rr0: has our chilly neighbor to the north!

Kickass43: wassup witu?
Kickass43: u talkin funny
Kickass43: u pssd off or wat?

LZ0rr0: I have no idea
LZ0rr0: of what you are speaking.
LZ0rr0: I look forward to a fruitful and productive discussion...
LZ0rr0: between our two countries.
LZ0rr0: Also...

Kickass43: dude I comprendoed dat tha 1st time
Kickass43: u sound like sum "lrn 2 speak english" prgrm
Kickass43: "fruitful & pructive discushun"
Kickass43: dats not how buds talk!

LZ0rr0: Perhaps that is because...
LZ0rr0: we are not "buds" as you say.

Kickass43: ?!

LZ0rr0: "Buds" do not build walls between each other.
LZ0rr0: I have long taken issue with your American saying...
LZ0rr0: "Good fences breed good neighbors."
LZ0rr0: In our case they only breed bad feeling.

Kickass43: foxy!
Kickass43: ur so messin wit my hed
Kickass43: have u like evn bin followin tha crap im takin
Kickass43: ovr immigrashun?!

LZ0rr0: It is not as if we are Palestinians.
LZ0rr0: Perhaps then I might have more comprehension...
LZ0rr0: if we were sending over the suicide bombers...
LZ0rr0: and not the pleasant muchachos...
LZ0rr0: to mow your lawns.

Kickass43: dats wat im sayin
Kickass43: im AGENS tha wall
Kickass43: u kno dat
Kickass43: im pushin 2 sho yall
Kickass43: tru blu merickan hospitalty
Kickass43: as r "gests"

LZ0rr0: Forgive me if I suggest...
LZ0rr0: that you have a peculiar way...
LZ0rr0: of expressing your hospitality.
LZ0rr0: No "guest" should ever wash his own dishes...
LZ0rr0: or clean his host's room.
LZ0rr0: But I do not plan to take issue...
LZ0rr0: withwhat you name your visa programs.
LZ0rr0: "Guest worker"is all the same to me...
LZ0rr0: as "Guest Services..."
LZ0rr0: if it's what your people prefer.
LZ0rr0: No, what I take issue with you, Jorge...
LZ0rr0: is what little we have to show of our so-called friendship...
LZ0rr0: after these five years.

Kickass43: how can u say dat?!

LZ0rr0: Very easily.
LZ0rr0: I send you more than 1,000,000 hard workers...
LZ0rr0: every year!
LZ0rr0: And all we hear back about them...
LZ0rr0: are the problems they cause!
LZ0rr0: Is it too much to ask for a simple "gracias"
LZ0rr0: now and then?

Kickass43: not evry1 sees it dat way...

LZ0rr0: No. Of course not.
LZ0rr0: They will see the small spot left on the floor...
LZ0rr0: and not the tidied shelves.

Kickass43: look im doin my best...

LZ0rr0: And now this wall.
LZ0rr0: I do not see you building a wall between the US and Canada.
LZ0rr0: Is that because they are a white country?

Kickass43: no foxy
Kickass43: we aint doin dat cuz a wall...
Kickass43: still wdnt keep tha cold out!
Kickass43: :-)

LZ0rr0: You can be sure I will be seeking support
LZ0rr0: from my new amigo Esteban.
LZ0rr0: He will surely understand that...
LZ0rr0: an open border policy is in our mutual interest.

Kickass43: got newz re ur bud "Esteban"
Kickass43: dats y i IMd u

LZ0rr0: What is this "news"?

Kickass43: gotta 2 giv u tha heds up

LZ0rr0: Tell me Jorge!

Kickass43: o so now we're BFs

LZ0rr0: si si
LZ0rr0: Even the best of friends...
LZ0rr0: will have their differences.

Kickass43: fine
Kickass43: k so heres tha problemo with Esteban:
Kickass43: the dude duznt party
Kickass43: srsly

LZ0rr0: You are serious?

Kickass43: ttlly
Kickass43: dats tha buzz @ state
Kickass43: Duznt. Party.

LZ0rr0: But he is Canadian!

Kickass43: go figr

LZ0rr0: Jorge you must be mistaken.
LZ0rr0: I know these Canadians very well.
LZ0rr0: For three months of every year...
LZ0rr0: they replace the percentage of our population
LZ0rr0: that we have sent to you.
LZ0rr0: They are known among my people as "icebacks."
LZ0rr0: And while they do not work while they are here...
LZ0rr0: (nor tip--I am told it is not in their tradition)
LZ0rr0: they account for fully 17% of all tequila consumption...
LZ0rr0: second only to Texas A&M students on spring break.
LZ0rr0: I find it hard to believe that Estoban...
LZ0rr0: will not maintain his country's reputation...
LZ0rr0: while in Cancun.

Kickass43: trust me bud
Kickass43: wrd is tha dudes a stiff

LZ0rr0: I am most distressed.

Kickass43: face it
Kickass43: cdn ldrs havnt par-tayd since my dad's bf mulroony

LZ0rr0: I had not yet had the honor of being elected President of Mexico.
LZ0rr0: At that time I ruled the Latin American cola market.

Kickass43: well I wuz ther dude
Kickass43: roony & I STILL talk bout how much
Kickass43: we miss drinkin
Kickass43: u shda seen gorby
Kickass43: on tha piano...

LZ0rr0: So what will we do with this stiff Esteban?

Kickass43: shortsheet his bed

LZ0rr0: Always so funny!
LZ0rr0: And our indigenous Mayan peoples...
LZ0rr0: can introduce to him the "bottle" dance...
LZ0rr0: in which one performs lively steps...
LZ0rr0: with a bottle balanced on one's head.
LZ0rr0: In tribute we can make it a "Molson's."

Kickass43: ur tha fox!

LZ0rr0: We still have much to discuss Jorge.

Kickass43: manyana
Kickass43: adios

Kickass43 has left the chat.

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists
Patient Remembers Every Day and Almost Every Detail of Her Life

March 20, 2006 -- - James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren't a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.

"We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh.

His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete.

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.

That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.

"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.

But she did.

"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.

"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.

When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."

She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.

"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.

That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.

AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.

"So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it."

Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.

She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.

"Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow," he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who "couldn't make change or couldn't take a bus because he didn't know where he was."

By contrast, AJ is a " fully functioning person," McGaugh says.

The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It's possible AJ's brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.

"We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there's anything that is dramatically different that we can point to," McGaugh says.

Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we live and how to get to work, but we may not know what the weather was like on this date four years ago.

It's possible that AJ's brain has some "disconnections" that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal."

Some day, the researchers say, they hope to know what's different about AJ's brain, but they are still a ways off.

"In order to explain a phenomenon you have to first understand the phenomenon," McGaugh says. "We're at the beginning."

W's Ohio humiliation

No president in our lifetime has seen his fundamental competence so doubted in public as has Bush. If he were slick, he'd sacrifice Cheney.

By Garrison Keillor

March 22, 2006 | A peacock walked past the window as I ate breakfast last Saturday at an old country inn in Albuquerque, N.M., his great fan of bejeweled feathers open wide, following a peahen who was pecking around the gravel as if he didn't exist. The peacock appeared to be infatuated, shuffling around, waggling his rump, craning his bright blue neck, the little doodads on his head bouncing around rather fetchingly, and the peahen kept scratching in the dirt, looking for grubs. Think of Elvis in a silver jumpsuit doing "One Night" at the Sands and the audience studying the dinner menu and trying to decide between the salmon and the baby ribs. Finally he got her cornered up against the window and then he stretched the great fan open to the max and he strutted and stuck out his chest and waved the tail feathers. The lady appeared interested for a while, and then she slipped past him and he deflated in about three seconds.

It was painful for a man to watch this. The peacock's great fan of iridescent blue-green beauty, when it deflates, becomes a feather duster, a street sweeper. You go from Waldemar the Magnificent to Bobo the Groundskeeper.

He reminded you of the president trying to win hearts and minds in Ohio this week, except Mr. Bush's tail feathers have been pecked practically clean by events. It was likewise painful for anyone to watch. As painful as seeing Henry Kissinger at a recent conference on Vietnam say he had no regrets. No president in your lifetime or mine has seen his fundamental competence -- his ability to think clearly and manage the government -- so doubted by the voting public as Mr. Bush has. This is humiliation of a rare sort.


If Mr. Bush wanted to reverse his slide, he could do it with a phone call to his vice president. Tell him, "Hey, Gunner, I'm sending over your resignation. Sign it and leave the building immediately, and don't take any floppies with you." Mr. Cheney would have a grand mal seizure right there, and be taken away to a sanitarium, and then Mr. Bush could get 1) Newt Gingrich, 2) John McCain, 3) Jeb Bush, 4) Rudolph Giuliani -- take his pick. America needs a No. 2 who wouldn't give Americans a coronary if he became No. 1. The top story on the news that night is "Gunner Dumped as Veep," and a fresh breeze blows through Washington, and the American people perk up and imagine that the Current Occupant is in charge and able to connect the dots.

"Cheney Resigns" is the headline for two days, and anonymous White House sources say that Gunner was cut loose because he was blind, deaf and demented on the subject of Iraq. The suspense of Who Will the New Prince Be? occupies us for a week. The pundits and bloggers puff and blow and when finally the new man is confirmed by the Senate and gives a ringing speech about the need to put our differences behind us and all pull together, lo and behold the subject has been changed and America is no longer standing around the coffee machine talking about what a dope the president is. Nobody uses the I-word (incompetent). We're still buzzed from the big news.

Defeat is inevitable in life, and every cock is bound to meet a hen who isn't interested, and eventually we all go shuffling off to the Old Soldiers Home and plop down in front of the TV set and doze through the shows. We're all destined to fall apart. But you don't have to do it in your 50s when everybody is looking at you. You can fall apart gently and privately. Don't go down hard like Dennis Kozlowski or Bernie Ebbers or Kenneth Lay.

I once saw an old Hollywood star eating breakfast in a hotel dining room in Dublin. He was touring in a play that had been reviewed rather gently and compassionately, and here he was with his famous face, grinning at a couple of tourists who came over to ask him to autograph their placemat. Once he was an icon and sex symbol, and now he was 80, an old trouper enjoying his breakfast and smiling at the world. Gerry got to that place, and Jimmy and Ronnie, I think, and George H.W. and for sure Bill has gotten there. People see Bill in public, grinning, and they can't help it, they grin back.


If you want to be beloved, don't wait too long.

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this is a bit old, but obviously still pertinent. and, its long, but definitely worth the read and your time....

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Ten ways to argue about the war

How to talk back to die-hard war supporters.
By Michael Schwartz

Dec. 06, 2005 | I often receive e-mails -- pro and con -- about my postings on the war in Iraq, and I try to respond to any substantive questions or critiques offered. But when I received an e-mail titled "10 Questions," in response to a TomDispatch commentary detailing the arguments for immediate withdrawal, I must admit my heart sank -- the questions were familiar, but the answers were complex and I was in no mood to spend the time needed to respond properly.

After a couple of days, however, I began to warm to the idea of writing short but pointed responses to these common criticisms of antiwar positions because, I realized, they are the bread and butter of daily Iraq discourse in our country. When the war comes up in the media or in casual conversation, these are the issues raised by those who think we have to "stay the course" -- and among those who oppose the war, these are the lurking, unspoken questions that haunt our discussions. So here are my best brief answers to these key issues in the crucial, ongoing debate over Iraq.

"I read your article on withdrawal of American troops," my correspondent began, "and questioned the lack of discussion of the following..." (His comments are in bold.)

1. Nothing was mentioned about improvements in Iraq (elections, water and energy, schools). No Saddam to fear! Water and energy delivery as well as schools are worse off than before the U.S. invasion. Ditto for the state of hospitals (and medical supplies), highways and oil production. Elections are a positive change, but the elected government does not have more than a semblance of actual sovereignty, and therefore the Iraqi people have no power to make real choices about their future. One critical example: The Shiite/Kurdish political coalition now in power ran on a platform whose primary promise was that, if elected, they would set and enforce a timetable for American withdrawal. As soon as they took power, they reneged on this promise (apparently under pressure from the United States). They have also proved quite incapable of fulfilling their other campaign promises about restoring services and rebuilding the country; and for that reason (as well as others), their constituents (primarily the Shiites) are becoming ever more disillusioned. In the most recent polls, Shiite Iraqis now are about 70 percent in favor of U.S. withdrawal.

2. Nothing was mentioned about Iraqis who want the U.S. to remain (especially the Kurds and the majority of Iraqi women). Among the three principal ethno-religious groups in Iraq, the Sunnis (about a fifth of the population) are almost unanimous in their opposition to the American presence, while around 70 percent of the Shiites (themselves about 60 percent of the population) want the United States to withdraw. Hence, even before we consider the Kurds, the majority of Iraqis are in favor of a full-scale American departure "as soon as possible." It is true that the Kurds (about 20 percent of the population) favor the United States remaining. However, they have their own militias, and many of them do not want significant numbers of American troops in their territory. (The U.S. presence there is small scale at the moment.) What they desire is a U.S. occupation for someone else, not themselves. I think we can safely say that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. troops.

I know of no study indicating that Iraqi women favor the U.S. presence. Perhaps you are referring to the fact that large numbers of women in Iraq are upset and angry over the erosion of their rights since the fall of Saddam. I know some commentators claim that the U.S. presence is insurance against further erosion of those rights, but everything I have read indicates that a significant number of Iraqi women (like all other Iraqis) blame the Bush administration for these policies. After all, the Americans installed in power (and continue to support) the political forces spearheading anti-woman policies in the country. Polling data does not indicate that any sizable group of Sunni or Shiite women support a continued U.S. presence.

3. Nothing was mentioned about the benefits of the U.S. military gaining valuable experience and knowledge daily. Certainly, the U.S. gains military and political "experience" from the war, as from any war, but at the expense of many deaths (2,127) and injuries (at least 15,704) to American soldiers. Beyond these publicly listed casualty figures lie the endless ways in which the lives of our soldiers are permanently damaged: On Nov. 26, for example, the New York Times reported on a recent Army study indicating that 17 percent of all personnel sent to Iraq have "serious symptoms of depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder." Since about a million American troops have now seen service in Iraq, approximately 170,000 have gained the "experience" of having a severe mental problem. Moreover, the war experience in Iraq has proved so demoralizing to the military that many of the best soldiers are leaving at the end of their tours, instead of staying on in active or reserve status. This is undermining the viability of the military, long term.

U.S. casualties, of course, have been dwarfed by the damage done to the Iraqi people. Between 25,000 and 40,000 Iraqi civilians are dying each year -- and multitudes are injured. We are wrecking the country's infrastructure.

Certainly there is a better way to gain experience than this.

4. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of a strong democracy in the Middle East. We can all agree that a strong democracy in the Middle East would have huge benefits for Iraq and for its neighbors as well as for the rest of the world. If I thought that our actions there were helping to bring this about, perhaps I might also believe that the benefits of an active democracy outweighed at least some of the many problems we have been creating. But from the beginning, the talk of democracy was a hollow mantra, just one of a group of public rationalizations for a war motivated by the Bush administration's desire to dominate Middle Eastern politics and economics. The U.S. government has never actually relinquished sovereignty to the Iraqi government.

5. Nothing was mentioned about the future benefits of oil reserves. Though the Bush administration denies it, many observers agree with you that access to Iraqi oil was a major motivation for the war. But we need to understand the nature of this motivation. Even before the invasion, when U.N. sanctions were still in place against Saddam Hussein's regime, American oil companies could (and, in many cases, did) buy Iraqi oil at market price. The issue was never "access" to Iraqi oil in the sense of simply being able to buy it. The Bush administration was thinking about other kinds of energy access, including controlling the heartland of the word's main future oil supplies and giving American oil companies privileged access to Iraqi oil reserves. (See, for example, the recent report by the Global Policy Forum.) It's my contention that such privileged "access" for U.S. oil companies would not help the American people. Moreover, such privileged access would have deprived the Iraqis of their right to use the oil to their own benefit -- something they desperately need now that the Saddam Hussein regime, 12 years of brutal sanctions, and the current war have gutted the country.

The best approach for us (but not necessarily for the American oil companies) would be to buy our oil on the open market, put our research money into conservation and renewable fuels instead of military adventures, and avoid trying to get "control" of something that doesn't belong to us.

6. Nothing was mentioned about what fundamentalist Muslims would like to achieve. I assume that, when you refer to "fundamentalist Muslims," you are referring to terrorists, including those in Iraq and those who attacked the World Trade Center, the London tube, and the Madrid trains. First, I have to disagree with this identification of the terrorists (who are indeed fundamentalist) with all fundamentalist Muslims. That would be the same as characterizing those who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building as "fundamentalist Christians" and then implying that the destruction of such buildings is what all fundamentalist Christians yearn to achieve.

Second, I disagree with the implicit argument that somehow withdrawal will allow the terrorists to dominate Iraqi society and impose a horrible regime on an Iraq bent on attacking its neighbors and the United States. A large part of my commentary in favor of withdrawal was devoted to debunking this prevalent idea. I think I made a reasonably good case for the possibility that Bush administration actions in Iraq are creating and strengthening the terrorist groups within the Iraqi resistance. The longer the United States stays, the more the Islamic terrorists there are likely gain strength; the sooner the United States leaves, the more quickly the resistance will subside, and -- with it -- support for terrorism. The administration's Iraqi occupation policies are the equivalent of a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophesy.

7. Nothing was mentioned about the results of the U.S. evacuation from Southeast Asia (over a million killed within 5 years). I think we need to disentangle two different events involving the (forced) American departure from Southeast Asia. First, there was Vietnam, where it was always predicted that a horrendous bloodbath would follow any American withdrawal. Indeed, there were certainly deaths there after the U.S. left, and many refugees fled the country, some for the United States. But whatever these figures may have been, they were dwarfed by the incredible bloodbath that the United States created by being in Vietnam in the first place. Reputable sources suggest that millions of Vietnamese died (and countless others were permanently wounded) during the war years. We must conclude, therefore, that in Vietnam our departure actually resulted in a drastic decline in the levels of violence, and -- sometime afterward -- an end to the havoc and destruction, not to speak of the fact that, for years now, the United States has had plenty of "credibility" in Vietnam.

Second, there was the holocaust in Cambodia, which may well have resulted in a million or more deaths. This was also, however, a complex consequence of the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia, not a result of our departure. Cambodia had a stable, neutral government until the Nixon administration launched massive secret bombings against its territory, invaded the country, destabilized the regime, and set in motion the grim unraveling that led to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge. If the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1965 or 1968, that holocaust would quite certainly never have happened.

The situation in Iraq is not that dissimilar. If the United States withdraws soon, there is at least a reasonable chance that the violence will subside quickly and that peace and stability in the region might ever so slowly take hold. The longer the United States stays -- further destroying the Iraqi infrastructure and destabilizing neighboring regimes (like Syria and Iran) -- the more likely it is that horrific civil wars and other forms of brutality will indeed occur.

8. Nothing was mentioned about the reputation of the U.S. if it retreats. Don't forget the quotes about Somalia from Osama bin Laden: "Cut and run." Here we agree. If the United States withdraws, this "retreat" will undermine U.S. credibility whenever, in the future, an administration threatens to use military power to force another country to submit to its demands (and may also, as after Vietnam, make Americans far more wary about sending troops abroad to fight presidential wars of choice). I think there are two important implications that derive from this observation.

The first is that this has, in fact, already happened. The most crystalline case making this point is that of Iran, whose leaders were much more compliant to U.S. demands before the Iraq invasion than they are now that they have seen how the Iraqi resistance has frustrated our military. In fact, the invasion of Iraq has probably done more to strengthen the oppressive Iranian regime, domestically and in the Middle East, than any set of events in the past quarter-century. In other words -- from your point of view -- the longer the Bush administration stays and flounders, the more it undermines its ability to use the threat of military intervention to force other countries to conform to its demands.

From my point of view -- and this is the second implication I want to point out -- the undermining of U.S. credibility is one of the few good things that have resulted from the war in Iraq. I do not believe that anything positive is likely to come from American military adventures; quite the contrary, the Bush administration (and the Clinton, earlier Bush, and Reagan administrations) have used military power to impose bad policies on other countries. We would be much better off, I believe, with the multipolar world that many Americans advocate (and this administration loathes the very thought of), in which no single state (including the United States) could impose itself on others without at least the support of a great many others. We would be far better off in a multitude of ways if our country stopped spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined and started spending some of that money on things that would improve the welfare of our people.

9. Nothing was mentioned about Germany, Japan, Korea and the former Yugoslavia. Should we get out of those? Where was the prewar planning to get out of all those locations? Did Lincoln have a prewar plan to leave the South? I agree that some wars, some interventions and some occupations can be positive things (without evaluating the particulars of the examples you offer). That does not mean that all, or even most, of them are good. The invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq is neither justified nor moral.

10. Nothing was mentioned about 9/11, where we were attacked by fundamentalist Muslims. How do we change their attitudes? This query rests on two premises: The first belongs to the Bush administration and was part of the package of lies and intelligence manipulations that it used to hustle Congress and the American people into war -- the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, had anything in common or any ties whatsoever. They didn't, and the truth is that 9/11, important as it was, really should have nothing to do with Iraq and no place in any discussion of the war there -- or at least that was certainly true until George Bush and his advisors managed almost single-handedly to re-create Iraq as the "central theater in the war on terror."

The second premise is one held by many Americans -- that the only way to change the attitudes of those who are fighting the United States involves "whipping their ass," which rests on another commonly held opinion -- that "these people only understand force." Attitudes are never changed in this way. Every serious scholar who studies terrorism agrees on this essential point: Terrorism arises from the misery that many people are forced to live in or in close proximity to. It is misguided and criminal, but it nevertheless derives from complaints people have about their daily lives, about the humiliations they experience in the larger social and political worlds they inhabit, and about the apparent impossibility of changing these circumstances.