[mburbank]

I'll leave speciffic arguments to BT, who's doing a fine job and just say everybody already knows what I think of that codswallop.

"pussyfooting" and 'Tough Line" are great for action movies and afterschool specials. World diplomacy is a little harder than that, and the afterafects are a little more far reaching. We live in a world now created by foreign policy that walked away from the Mujahadeen after arming and funding them for half a generation, keeping troops in Saudi Arabia giving a rallying cry to the same religous extremists we'd used so effectively against the soviets. If The shape of our current mess was influnced so profoudly by the blowback from those misssteps, imagine what you'll be dealing with fixing by the time you're my age.

If you answered "A bold new Middle East inspired and reshaped by Iraqs fedgling Democracy" I'm going to go way out on a limb and say I doubt it.