Little Beaver?
ok...

Trying to find the moral high ground on this issue is like [insert you own clever analogy illustrating impossibility here].

Personally I prefer the word "ethics" over "morality," but that's a matter of taste. Anyway, even if ethics were the only consideration--which obviously it isn't--this would still be a difficult and painful matter. My feeling is that if we don't approach this also with a very healthy dose of pragmatism and self-interest, we're simply setting ourselves up for a terrible fall.

*begin rant*

Self-interest and the survival instinct are not evils, they are necessities. A despot like Saddam can acquire and/or make the tools needed to kill Americans by the thousands if not millions. That isn't sensationalism or propoganda, it's a simple and terrible fact of our time. It's been stated several times recently that the legacy and measurable impact of the Second World War is fading, but I think there is one remnant of that war which will haunt us forever, and that, of course is nuclear weaponry. I think people sometimes lose track of the fact that WW2 was in fact our first nuclear war.

And yes, it was us who dropped those bombs and vaporized those cities...but that does not mean we owe the world a swipe at us in retribution. We do not need to manufacture our own karma. We do not need to kneel before the world, humbly ignoring our status as the sole superpower. We became the first user of nuclear weaponry for one simple reason--we were the first to acquire the power. Had we not, we'd have watched London and Moscow destroyed before becoming the target ourselves.

How much damage, pain and death must we suffer before we raise a hand? How many American cities must be offered up before we can act in self-defense? How long must we keep up a charade in which we act like a middle-power, playing down to the level of our opponents?

In matters of self-defense, what's the point of not acting like a super-power? There can be only one, and that's to allow Americans to die.

This is not the world of 60 years ago, and it's taken 60 years to really come to terms with that. If we continue to do things the way we always have, simply because "that's the way Americans have always done it," then we won't survive. We need to do now what we've always done better than anyone else: adapt, change and grab the future with both hands.

*end rant*

Little Beaver, over and out.