If you go back to your original post, your thesis seemed to be--and correct me if I misread it--that an intelligent and benevolent nation could simply assume a non-aggressive defensive posture by projecting the image of overpowering force, and that aggressors would somehow realize that they had nothing to gain by attacking. Bingo: peace forever.

Some of the holes in this are:

A: There are a hell of a lot of place aggressors have attacked and will attack that are not the United States. Nobody else really HAS that much of a normal military any more. What now? We sit and watch, and wait until the crap finally gets to our borders?

B: Crazy people will not be deterred. Al Qaeda was not deterred, and there is not one person on this board who will not agree that if they had had some method of getting a thermonuclear warhead into Manhattan, they would have set one off with no hesitation or fear of reprisal. Obviously Saddam was not intimidated into real cooperation by our military. Iran is not being intimidated now, and former leaders of that country have stated already that they would not find a nuclear retaliation on their own nation too high a price to pay for a nuclear attack on Israel.

The Cold War is over. The Soviets would not have bombed Manhattan. There are plenty of others out there who would, and did, and an arsenal of two million atomic missiles isn't going to stop them.

I have never said that the world is hopeless, that peace is not worth pursuing, or any of the other cartoon positions you cheerfully assign to me.

What I do know is that the fantasies you have about what it takes to achieve it aren't true. Being able to make a statement like "war stopped working in the 20th century" with a straight face says it all. It is the arrogance typical of the left that insists that it stands at the peak of history.

Tell those who are committing genocide in Africa as I write this, or those who are convinced that killing enough Americans will give them control of the New Caliphate and an impotent West. Tell those feverishly developing nuclear weapons to bring Paradise on earth.

Tell the U.N. to fix it. Then see who they call.