>I know this is a very popular view in the US that you have protected us. I can't remember all your previous comments but I think you have inside information from the military that Russia was about to attack us in the 70's. So you told Gorbachev that you had were going to build a missle shield and he backed down. But he could have attacked Britain, France, Germany or Japan but he didn't. They had no plans to build a missle shield and they were much closer. Exactly why did Gorbachev want to attack Canada? Now if you are talking about some other county attacking us, could you tell me which country it was. I am of the opinion that if Canada was on the other side of the world we still wouldn't have been attacked.

I don't think the U.S. protected Canada in a military sense. I think our stand in the Cold War lead to the defeat of an empire ( yep, an evil one ) that was a stain on the face of humanity. ( the face at the end was Gorbachev, but the heart of the U.S.S.R. was always Stalin )

The missle shield was never built and never protected anything. Nobody thought the Soviet Union was going to attack. That wasn't what the doctrine of mutually assured destruction was all about. But the nature of the Cold War was parity. Hence the proxy wars. In the Carter years Zbibniew B. actually said the advance of communism was inevitable and the best we could hope for was to slow it down. Reagan didn't believe it. He believed the goal should be to destroy the Soviet Empire - that the Wall, and the Gulags and the Stasi and the cells in the Lubyanka were unacceptable. Of course all respectable intellectual opinion knew Reagan was stupid. I didn't really get it at the time. I left government service in the early Reagan years because I was very distressed by the people we had to get in bed with to fight the proxy wars. Spending enough time in SE Asia and the Middle East will do that to you.

But he scared hell out of the Soviet military. Their economy was already heading into the tank. They tried to spend to keep up. When the got bogged in Afghanistan, we poured in money and arms to make it as unpleasant as their money and arms made Vietnam for us.

And we won. And so did the people of Eastern Europe and Russia. It was world changing and the mushroom clouds we saw in our dreams as children in the 50s became a little less likely.

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>>I was at a client in Toronto recently and said, "I think it would be great to have the Canadian social system and the American military for defense." and my Canadian friend said, "Yeah, that's what we have." <s>
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>I am not saying that some Candians don't think like you do. One third of the Canadians supported the War in Iraq before it started. The difference is that now that we have seen the misfire, most have changed their views.

Yeah, people like to cheer for teams they think are winning. We have baseball fans like that in Cleveland. Their opinion doesn't mean much because they are not willing to get in the game. They have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines because they are not players. They have no responsiblity so they can have opinions without consequence. Teenagers are like that.

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>>Iraq is not about getting our way. It is about making a choice from a list of bad alternatives. Great nations do not have the luxury of standing back to let others deal with threats to their national security.
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>A question. I know its hard to get out of Iraq now that you are in. But if you were president and you knew what you know now about a) no WMD and b) no link to Al Qaeda would you still have attacked Iraq?

I don't know what all the intelligence was. Neither do you or Michael Moore. We don't know what is in Iraq now or what was there then. And we don't know what the people who know know. That much I know <g> I don't know about 'no link to Al Qaeda' There were certainly enough links to people who wished us ill. Al Qaeda is not the only problem. Saddam had to go. The question was how.

Would I have attacked when Bush did ? I don't know. A smart politician would have talked tough and stalled until after the election. I hope that if I thought it was what had to be done, I would have had the courage to do it. It was a very very tough call. The petty people who assume it was done lightly or without thought to the consequences tell me more about themselves than they reflect an understanding of how decision making works on the part of those with unimaginable responsibility.

>You know the deal that Jimmy Carter came up with for Egypt has turned out pretty well. The Camp David accord required that the US give both Israel and Egypt $4 Billion each year for their co-opertion. Israel gets cash money. But Egypt gets projects which are administered by the US Corp of Engineers. i.e. they get roads, sewers, runways etc. but no money that can disappear into a Swiss Bank Account. Now the UN should have been able to handle something like that for Iraq. What do you think?'

I give Saddat a lot of credit. But one of the points that Lewis makes in his latest "The Crisis of Islam" is that Saddat did not die for that, but for his rather secular view of society and his suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.

I think the Palestinians would have been well advised in the 60s to adopt a policy of civil disobedience to Israel occupation. American Jews would have supported a two state solution, the U.S. would have pressured Isreal, and security issues would not have prevented a solution. They would have had a homeland by 1970 and they would have been a very rich country in partnership with Israel and Lebanon. But the 'Leaders' couldn't profit from that. Its a lot easier to blow up school buses than it is to run schools.

Perhaps with the passing of the greatest roadblock to a solution, the many sensible and decent Palestinians will insist on policies that are in the best interests of the Palestian people, not thugs like Arafat and his cronies who have enriched their pockets and egos while doing nothing for the people they manipulate but strap bombs to bodies of their children.

The Palestinian people deserve better.

And they deserve to know who their real enemies are.