Wow Kerry took the Florida primary!

[Occhidiangela]

For as long as I have been an adult, the US spends billions per year on a huge range of foreign aid packages. Since the mid 1990's, to that bill is added -- though the NGO's avoid understanding the cost and the whiners cry about "raw foreign aid" dollars per capita -- an immense, multi billion dollar annual investment in peace keeping, and more importantly peace enforcement, in the Balkans and elsewhere. The multi billion annual bill for Bosnia and Kosovo, alone, is peace enforcement, and is completely ignored as a contribution to preventing war and to slowly but surely trying to put those nations on their feet.

Peace aint cheap, though war is more expensive.

Peace enforcement and peacekeeping risks making a nation a foreign aid junky, like Haiti has been for decades.

Your whole stance on the "either or" approach to "doing good in the world" seems to me a bit myopic. Who defines the real value of any particular action as "helping out someone else?" Well, the commentator, and that seems to include an agenda filter that skews the picture.

Take for example Afghanistan: Part of the side benefit there was the restoration of a modicum of women's rights that the Taliban had suppressed rather handily. How do you put a price on that?

The active engagement of Sec Powell in the last year or so to help out in the Pakistan India issue. I won't say he pulled off any coups, but the active engagement helped the process. I can only salute the leaders of India and Pakistan for taking a step backward from the brink.

I will take a risk here and suggest you look at the Iraqi Constitutional Convention (still a work in progress, I don't believe that an initial agreement is a final agreement, see our own process for an example . . . :) )

The fact that they are going through that process, even with all of the cat fights that go with it, is an immense move forward for liberalism. Yes, you heard that, that is a step forward for liberalism in its truist sense.

Now, is it pure?

Nah, there are political strings all over it, from US, various European nations, various UN agencies, and of course some local players. But its a step forward. The anti liberals in Iraq are bombing folks to use terror to corrupt an attempt to give Iraq a shot at a liberal form of government. (Do they really want one? Well, there are some well run liberal governments in Europe that they can look to as examples of reasonable success, if you think that the US model is poorly suited to Iraq. The multi party parliaments of Germany, England and Italy, for example, where coalition building is necessary for progress, might be a good fit for Iraq.)

Some 2 to 3 billion per year to Egypt to keep the Middle East peace process going on at least one front. Working with other nations to help Lybia come back into the arms of the international community. Projects all over central asia that are aimed at both secutiry and economic development of nations who have been in the international backwater for decades.

I could go on, but I won't. Too much that the US does overseas gets no fanfare. Just what people are pissed about is on a lot of TV screens, and that is due to a personal animus against Pres Bush.

I find that mean spirited, even though I too have reservations in regard to some policies being proposed.

I still think that the UN-US tension last year was clumsily handled, though that was a very tough policy bit in any case.

Occhi