Dean:

I think we have spent money on the military when we had to. We entered the Second World War 3 years before you did. (You waited for Pearl Harbour).

The best story about the Cold War was the "Evil Empire" story from Ronald Regan. This lead to plans to build laser guns in space to stop the missles that would be coming in from Russia. We were touring Russia at the time. They couldn't pump water to the top floors of their apartment buildings. People were not getting enough to eat. They could not grow crops or make anything effeciently because of a) laziness and b) corruption and black market.

We visited 10 cities and maybe saw 10 military people. They were all on foot and without weapons.

Time and Newsweek had reporters in the Soviet Union and we never saw one article offering a discenting opinion that Russia was really not very threatening. Thats when I first realized that even though you have a "free press" it really isn't free. CNN can get an interview with any Cabinet Minister, Senator or Congessman because they follow the rules in supporting the propaganda. I think our media does much more investigative stuff against the government so we get more balanced information.

We waited out the War in Vietnam because our media was not very anti-communist. And to this day, we do not have bad feeling toward Russia, China or Cuba simply because they are Communist. We would need a specific issue like the Tienamen Square riots to turn us against a government.

We pretty much waited out the Cold War with Russia.

We did fight in the first war with Iraq because it was sanctioned by the UN. We fought in Kosovo for the same reason.

Most Canadians do not want to participate in the nuclear shield that Paul Celucci keeps pushing on us. I think his theory is either that Russia will switch and decide to shoot at us or maybe terrorists will get a hold of a war head and figure out how to launch it against us. We would need a little more information about exactly who the enemy is first. The second issue is, would it work? The scientific community is almost universally against this idea because even in 20 years we won't have the technology to make this work. The third issue is suppose we spent 10 trillion dollars on this and got it to work after 20 years. All the terrorists have to do is get a row boat and bring in their bomb in a suitcase onto the shores of California and we would be toast anyway. (Ref: Farheneit 911 by Michael Moore). Its OK, we would be so broke at that point that there would be nothing worth blowing up.