"All nation-states attempt to influence their neighbors, friends and rivals in order to promote their own security and prosperity. Great powers due it on a global scale. That's just a fact of life, and has been so since Pharaoh's time. The alternative is isolationism, and we know that doesn't work. Short of that, there are gradations, from alliances and treaties and neotiations, ranging all the way to war."

And I'm not silly enough to say otherwise. However, my point is that even in good times, with good leadership, we are not very good at applying power in the middle east because of the defective quality of the nation states, and the byzantine and counter-intuitive nature of the real underlying struggles that drive the events of the region.

"Sure, there are risks and possibilities for abuse and downright stupidity, but I see little alternative. Foreign policy is not an exact science, and sometimes it fails, and sometimes it succeeds. As long as fighting can be avoided, or at least postponed for a better time, then it is a success."

Again- I don't think you get where I'm coming from if you think I don't advocate the use of power and all its trappings. I just think that especially over the last 6 years we could not have done more to harm the region if we had sat down and tried.

Not that we shouldn't apply power, but we should apply it effectually, rationally, empirically and apply it in away that is wedded to reality and divorced from ideology.

"The interruption of energy supplies would be a tragedy not only to the industrialized West, but to the producing states as well. It could well end civilization on this planet for a thousand years; a post-apocalyptic Earth would not be able to drill offshore or build nuclear power plants or exploit solar power or travel to other planets. And we've already seen how the premature application of military force can be totally counter-productive. The only alternative is to get our way by making sure our potential rivals realize that they will benefit too, and that if we suffer, so will they."

Its this last part here that I think I have something to say about- When we are dealing with ideologies who see the paradigm of righteousness as the suicide bomber, where you not only harm yourself to strike a blow at your enemy, you kill yourself to do so.

The western notion of warfare is highly ritual- it is somewhat transparent to us, but its non-the-less true. We have rules, we have codes of conduct, etc. From Knights on horses counting coup to Geneva conventions and formal articles of surrender.

I think this is true for all cultures- warfare is a highly social, mostly lethal highly organized form of mass social behavior. Its all about the mechanics of threat and death- but the ritual of warfare extends from the cultural understanding of threat and death. So the rituals and mechanics of war are different in the middle east, just as they were in SE asia.

This is what I mean, if we want to win the 'war on terrorism', then we have to understand what it means to deal a defeat to the cultural groups we are fighting.

This is what I mean, also, when I say 'deterrence', and 'detente' and 'counterbalance' as we understand the concepts won't work in the ME. They may work for the nation states, who are modeled off western notions and bound to individual self interest... but the underlying cultures... No....

Anyway...