I wonder why the Soviet Union decided to just give up and join the human race and invite the American Nuclear inspectors in to help them dismantle their nukes, when all of my life I was told that they were not to be trusted and that they were the "dark enemy" of democracy? Why did they decide to end the cold war unilaterally and free the so-called "captive" nations of Eastern Europe? Is there something I missed? Was Ronald Reagan such a master of bluff that he single-handedly took apart the Soviet Union, or was it more likely that the Russian people were just tired of playing nuclear poker with the US and decide that it would be better to just quit than to see their grandchildren get melted and the ones that survived lose their teeth and hair?

Could it be that The United States of America was misleading us? How come people in Cuba love Fidel Castro? How come Daniel Ortega, that sultan of pinkoism got elected President, and 20 years later his people elected him President again? How come Mohamarr Khadafi is a tyrant one day, and peaceful the next? How come we supported Saddam Hussain, even let him strike one of our communications (spy) ships in the Gulf and then sold him the nerve gas he used on the Kurds, only to find later he was really crazy all along? Why did we help to form al Qaeda and equip them with RPG's and shoulder fired ground-to-air missiles and round up disaffected Sunni's (Mostly from Saudi Arabia) and send them to Afghanistan and then let them off on their own so they could supposedly blow up the World Trade Center?

How come we go rid of Salvador Allende and replaced him with Pinchot? Why do we constantly dabble in the world in order to make it go "our" way, and ten years later, almost everything we do comes back to bite us in the ass? What makes us so damn stupid in the first place? What kind of people do we get to run the CIA and the NSA and all the other "Black Ops" that we run? Are they all dropouts from school, or did they take so much methamphetamine to be the tops in their classes that it ended up burning out their brains?

Look, I'm not presupposing anything, my government does enough of that. I'm just wondering out loud. What I really want to know, is if we have such a lousy record in screwing up the world, and picking the wrong people for enemies and the wrong people for friends, then why don't we just give it up and mind our own business? It seems like everything we touched after the Marshall Plan turned to shit. Why do we keep doing it? The only thing that we seemed to have done halfway right was the Balkan War that the Republicans fried Clinton on. I could make a list of operations we got ourselves involved in that could probably go on for two pages. I can bet that out of the two pages of things that I could list, maybe 5% went the way we wanted them to go. Face it, our country isn't very good at choosing sides, and it isn't very good at choosing winners.

I hope that maybe, just maybe, if we ever get this Iraq thing straightened out, that we just leave the world alone. I hate to sound like Andy Rooney, but it seems like we do more to screw things up when we try to manipulate things, than if we would have left well enough alone. This is a screwed up nasty world, and it doesn't need us to make it any more screwed up and nastier. If we were any good at things like this, it might be a different story, but things being what they are, all we are doing is making the world hate us more than they already do. Besides, think of all the money we could save. We could take that money and just collect information, then if anyone were to want to attack us, maybe we would find out about it before they did attack us instead of trying to manipulate everything. Just a thought.