Wow Kerry took the Florida primary!

[Occhidiangela]

Edit, afterthought: It's a scary world when George Bush Sr. seems like an elder statesman of mythical proportion and oracular foresight.

What is scary is how limited your perspective is.

Some of us who have watched foreign policy for some time think GHW Bush was fairly competent at foreign policy. (I won't call him brilliant, few ever achieve that level. Metternich is not born every week.) Your failure to recognize his basic comptetnce is based more on your own blinders, and I dare say an anti-Western point of view, than on his actual record. GHW Bush is, and was, far more of an "pragmatic internationalist sovereignist" than any number of others I could mention.

I personally still give him bad marks for the Somalia operation, it was a complete waste of time, but while it ran under his rules it worked well enough. It came a cropper after Pres Clinton asked 1/3 of the troops to do the same job as the original 20,000 Marines. Gee, no surprise, things got worse when a half hearted effort was put forth. (there were operational errors as well, that no one should ever blame Pres Clinton for. He just set the conditions for, like LBJ/McNamara in another place, doing it half way.)

Where else to we see that a half baked effort makes a mess? The entire UN operation in Bosnia up until NATO played "out of area," the half baked attempts of the international communit to deal with the Rwanda fiasco, and I will stop with that sort list.

But as to being there in the first place, there was NO compelling national interest for America to be in Somalia, merely a desire to "do good." "Building good will" by catering to foreign aid junkies in concert with dozens of NGO's and donor organizations whose infusion of capital (in the form of aid) completely disrupted an already kaput economy and made "who controlled the free money" the coin of the realm. All to stop those useless, bleeding heart CNN pictures. Never let the media drive your foreign policy, leave to them reporting what you do. That is their job: reporting.

Doing good with bayonets is a hobby that typically produces mixed results. See the sucking chest wound that is Bosnia, Haiti in 1994 and now, or a different flavor in Cyprus, for fine examples. Peace will only last until the foreigners leave.

Think about that as a testament to how broken many places in the world are in the first place. Why? They don't "get" the Western idea of self governance beyond Musollini's broken model. :P

Occhi