I know that special forces and elite forces have been caught in a catch-22 with regards PTSD and mental illness. Most elite anyone is a little crazy, but the stigma associated with seeking psychological help if you’re in Delta or Force Recon is to basically admit that you’re broken.

Psychiatric help is available but you will rue the day you took advantage of it. Damned if you do or damned if you don’t. I know that some folks go to private doctors and pay out of their own pocket to make sure their perceived fitness level is never compromised. Very sad, really.

Well, I don’t know about the actual battlefield or elite forces but, according to the Drudge Retort, service men and women are now allowed to take “daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan:”

For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.

I love my big car but I also love American independence more and think that we rely way too much foreign oil and don’t spend nearly enough on energy innovation. Since coal and oil is still plentiful and cheap enough, there isn’t any reason, really, to dump R&D funds into alternative and renewable fuels, energy, and electricity. We need to in-source and work on ways to stop depending so heavily on foreign oil and the whims of kings and their kingdoms.

Congress is working on passing an energy bill that contains two major provisions, one that would up a fuel economy standard to 35 mpg — Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards — and another that would evolve our energy dependence more heavily on renewable electricity to 15% — Renewable Electricity Standards (RES). Together, these would end our Nation’s security-threatening dependence on Middle East oil, stop our money from flowing to terrorists, and keep our dollars at home growing the American economy.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and PACs are working hard to tear the bill apart, rendering it impotent and incremental instead of powerful and transformative.

I am working with a coalition to make sure the energy bill doesn’t get derailed. I need your help in making sure that the final bill makes it through before we get ourselves into even more of a mess. Check out Energy Bill 2007 and sign their petition.

Congress is working on passing an energy bill that contains two major provisions, one that would up a fuel economy standard to 35 mpg and another that would evolve our energy dependence more heavily on renewable electricity to 15%. Together, these would end our Nation’s security-threatening dependence on Middle East oil, stop our money from flowing to terrorists, and keep our dollars at home growing the American economy.

Unfortunately, lobbyists and PACs are working hard to tear the bill apart, rendering it impotent and incremental instead of powerful and transformative.

Listen to “Conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza has never been one to shy away from controversy and his new book is no less provocative. In ‘The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11,’ D’Souza maintains that liberals unwittingly provoke and help terrorists. He explained his views in a Jan. 23 Commonwealth Club of California speech.” Via Word for Word [Listen]

According to just about everyone, Saddam Hussein has been hung until dead. Via CNN.

I owe a buddy $100 but I still believe this was staged and Saddam Hussein was spared by his Blue Fairy Godmother.

“Stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ,” said North Carolina Congressman Robin Hayes. None dare call in conspiracy and none dare call it The Crusades. Via The Huffington Post. digg it!

The New York Times published an article, U.N. Says Somalis Helped Hezbollah Fighters, that shows links between the tribal war in Somalia with the tribal war in between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Iraq war isn’t anything like Vietnam, but is much more like the tribal chaos we endured under Clinton in Somalia.

Watch Blackhawk Down.

There are more things in common as well. Delta Force and Rangers. The footsoldier that hasn’t spent time at Fort Bragg, in San Diego, in Air Assault School, Ranger School, Jump School, will be made obsolete because counter-insurgency warfare is closer to spycraft than warcraft; closer to operations than mission.

Portions of JSOC units have made up the constantly changing counter-terror strikeforce variously known as Task Force 11, Task Force 121, Task Force 6-26, and Task Force 145 since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

It will make a lot of sense if you think “Iraq” or “Israel” instead of “Somalia.” Tribe comes before religion which comes before nation-state. To these insurgents, Somalia, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq are meaningless. It is all about the tribe, the family. And the legacy goes back thousands of years. That’s even bigger and deeper than Legacy Yale.

Some acronyms to look up with regards to future of warfare: USSOCOM, AFSOC, USASOC, USASFC, SFOD-D, PSYOP, USAJFKSWCS, NAVSPECWARCOM, DEVGRU, MARSOC, and the baddest of them all, JSOC. When your buddy is sporting this patch, everybody looks. JSOC includes Delta Force, SAS, DEVGRU (SEAL Team 6), 160th Airborne, 1st Battalion (Little Bird helicopters), USAF’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron, 16th Special Operations Wing, ISA.

Or as I like to say, JSOC is the new CIA, James Bondwise.

I have a $100 wager with a buddy that Saddam Hussein will never be put to death.

We made it back when Saddam Hussein was just yanked out of the spider hole. I don’t believe Hussein will ever be put to death. I believe, in proof that truth is stranger than fiction, that Saddam Hussein will find his Blue Fairy Godmother before he hits the gallows. From a review of Mother Night:

“Three months before the Americans enter the war, Howard’s ‘Blue Fairy Godmother,’ an anonymous representative of the U.S. War Department (John Goodman) approaches him to spy for the Americans. Campbell is to pretend to be a Nazi, broadcasting coded information during anti-semitic propaganda on his weekly radio show. The American government, he is warned, will never acknowledge his role. ‘You must be careful what you pretend to be,’ he writes in his memoirs later. ‘Because in the end, you are what you pretend to be.’”

“After being captured by the Americans (David Strathairn plays the G.I. who captures this Nazi propaganda machine), Campbell is again visited by his fairy godmother who quietly arranges his release and relocation to a life of anonymity in a Greenwich Village apartment.”

That’s what I think is going to happen with former US ally Saddam Hussein. Do you think I will win or lost $100?

“President Bush on Thursday signed into law a $94.5 billion compromise emergency bill to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to rebuild after last year’s hurricanes along the U.S. Gulf Coast.” The exposure in the media of the billion dollars misspent on debit cards being spent on champagne and Girls Gone Wild videos will make certain that 95% of the $95 billion will go to the war in Iraq. Mark my words. Via Yahoo! News

To make myself clear, in Using Two 500-Pound Bombs to Kill Zarqawi Wasn’t Sporting, I am not judging the US for taking out a city block to get one man, public enemy number one, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, I am just saying that I don’t believe it is sporting so to do — dynamiting a pond to get a fish, effective but it’s just not cricket, wot.

Sadly, in a war in which you can’t use an American-made .50 sniper rifle to terminate public enemy number 1 with extreme prejudice at a mile-and-a-half, then you certainly must call in air support to get your man (at least until we can work the kinks out of the satellite-based pulse cannons, although, like the .50 sniper rifle, I bet pulse laser weapons from space won’t be okay with NATO either). Just because I omitted it in the first article, I wanted to congratulate our flyboys both for allowing a mad killer to meet his maker and for serving their country in a time of war.

More news on the death of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi at Washington Post, CNN, Fox News

Mark sent this essay to me from the African bush, “Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.”

Biodiesel is not a solution. It is politics, it is spin, it is agribusiness profits, it is a hobby.
By Mark Harrison

Soy and canola and oil palm are food, they are not fuel. Do you really want humans to be competing with cars for their food source?

A human consumes on average 20 liters of edible oil a year. 20 liters – around five and a quarter gallons. Per year. How long does it take your car to consume five gallons of fuel? Half a day?

Worldwide, we are consuming around 85 million barrels of petroleum every day – that’s 13.5 billion liters per day. The entire human population only eats around 328 million liters of food oil a day. So, let’s compare: 13,500 million liters of fuel oil consumed every day vs. 328 million liters of food oil consumed every day. That’s 41 times more fuel oil than food oil consumed.

What makes biodiesel proponents think that biodiesel is an alternative to petroleum? How could we possibly increase food oil production by 41 times? Cut down the rest of the mangrove swamps for oil palm plantations? Raze the rest of the rain forest for soy bean fields? Just to run the world on B10 (10% biodiesel, 90% petroleum diesel – hardly an end to petroleum dependency) we’d have to increase plant oil production by a factor of four. That alone would require destroying the rest of our suffering ecosystem, and that type of food oil consumption would likely raise food prices to the point where the majority of the world’s population living on just a few dollars a day would starve to death – the world’s poor simply can’t compete with our cars.

So, the world running on 10% biodiesel = ecological disaster and mass starvation. Not an optimal solution. We’re still dependent on petroleum, but manage to bury the ecosystem and starve billions of people.

No, biodiesel is not a solution. It’s something for a small group of hobbyists. It is something for politicians to make hay off of. It is something for fools and people who can’t do simple math to fall for.

What is the solution – solar? Wind? Nukes? I can’t say, but it is certainly not dreaming that we can farm our way out of this, and the solution is certainly not in wasting our time and resources pursuing this dead end.

“The civilian death rate in Iraq is smaller than that of Washington, D.C, and several other American cities.” Via Blogs for Bush

I had dinner and drinks with a fellow and his lovely wife last night who does high-level strategic and tactical consulting for the US government…

This particularly hawkish fellow had an interesting answer when I asked him what he would wish the US would do in Irag if he had three wishes and couldn’t just undo the war or anything sneaky like that.

Guess what he said, “I would only need one wish and my one wish would be to immediately pull all American and allied troops out of Iraq and let everything fall where it may.”

He added that all indicators and all reports echo Vietman exactly; although this conflict is much worse with much less coverage. Why? Well even died-in-the-wool war correspondents are afraid to be there and are sporting full combat coverage and body armor, including helmets and vests.

He also suggested that all this war between the insurgents and the west is doing is allowing the tribal heads to sieze power and turn Iraq into yet another Mogadishu.

Food for thought. Of course, there are analysts on the ground who are writing up all of these recommendations, most of which are being censured.

Oh, and he also said that Donald H. Rumsfeld is doing the best he can, all things being equal. Rumsdeld is in much the same position (corner) that Robert S. McNamara was in Vietnam.

“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.” – George Wilhelm Hegel

“Patriotism ruins history.” – Goethe

“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” – Gustave Flaubert

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx

Yes, I did write Petroleum Oil An Organic Renewable Resource. Wouldn’t it be funny if oil prices were based on a false economy, a false scarcity, like diamonds?

What if oil were as plentiful and as easy to harness as compost? That the environmentalists are unwitting dupes who actually fuel inflated oil prices as an unintended consequence of crying “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.”

All markets desperately try to keep their product from being commoditized; or, they push to restrict production (a false scarcity) until profits stabilize (as in, become more profitable).

Commoditization kills profit margins.

Creating a sense of scarcity allows profits to improve just based on simple fear. And there is no end to where it can be ultimately pushed if the market is willing to remain flexible. Take agribusiness. Subsidies are not about paying farmers not to farm, it is about gaming the commodities market so that wheat is either easier to sell or more profitable to produce.

Let’s look at the diamond market.

This from Mark del Bianco when I popped him an IM looking for the world “false scarcity,” “DeBeers (South Africa) and the Russians have conspired to keep the worldwide supply low. The US DOJ has chased DeBeers for years on antitrust cases. DeBeers has to avoid the U.S. for that reason. They sell outside US.”

Same with oil. If you can push the profts of oil for a little while — or until the market fails or, more realistically, corrects itself — you can bring lots of other markets along for the ride, including precious metals (especially gold). It can be a real boon for the commodities broker and his brokerage.

I was moved to discuss this based both Anthony Citrano’s article, The Coming Islamic Superpowers?, and a missive I published from an unnamed journalist in an undisclosed location who had an interesting chat with a retired general, So a Retired General Walks up to a Journalist in a Bar….

So, this morning I go back to follow up on The Coming Islamic Superpowers? (thanks for the link, Anthony) and am happy to see some wonderful comments so I add my own:

Everything is ties together. Gold is flying as high as oil. Copper, too. The Chicago exchange is having a hayday. Don’t just look at who is making money on oil, look also at who is making money on contracts, on services, on shipping, and on commodities. That is where it is fun to look.

Follow the money.

Harry is right. Sustainable energy is just stealing from Peter to pay Paul.

It will aid the individuals who are early adopters, but when these initiatives become national or global solutions, there will be just the sort of blowback that Harry mentions.

The market is too smart — and is too interconnected — to fall for the “sustainable energy” solution.

Oh, and there is way too much money to be made to let the whole sustainable energy market become institutionalized. Agribusiness can ignore a lot of backyard personal gardens — can suffer them without the flattening of growth — but when the point of pain happens, then agribusiness might not be so kind.

The important thing to try to do is to find a replacement profit center for these investors — sort of a methadone — who are now invested in fossil fuel.

Organics worked for agribusiness. What will the methadone be for energy?

What do you think?

Says a journalist in an actual missive, “I was talking with a retired US general the other day…”

What follows is an actual conversation from an undisclosed location between an unnamed journalist and an unnamed retired general:

“What the fuck! This war in Iraq is a special forces war,” says a retired general, “we can prosecute this whole war with a small force of special forces operatives. A big occupying army does absolutely nothing to help us move ahead. It just presents a huge fucking target, militarily and politically, and pisses off the locals. Within the context of winning the war in Iraq, there is no reason to have any non-special forces troops there.”

So the journalist asks, “Uh, why are they there then?”

“Well,” replies the retired general, “because it scares the Iranians, and because we can just storm across the border, ready to go, all pumped and primed from the experience in Iraq.”

And the journalist asks, “why do we want to invade Iran?”

“Well,” says the retired general, “partly because we, like everyone else in the world, don’t want Iran to have The Bomb. But more because we don’t want China having a nice secure oil source for their 9% growth rate. We want them to know we can choke them if they get unruly – it’s not the execution of a threat that is powerful, it’s your adversary’s knowledge that you could that is powerful.”

“And even moreso,” adds the retired general, “we want Iran to just stop even think about opening a Euro-based oil bourse. If oil started being traded in Euros, demand for the Dollar would plummet and along with that, its value, and the US would be fucked since it depends on borrowing to survive. That is the attack that would kill us – no dirty nuke or anthrax would do more than inconvenience us a bit. A Euro oil bourse would sink the US like a tourniquet to the neck.”

“Frankly,” concludes the retired general, “those two reasons – Chinese wrapping up oil contracts, and the threat of a Euro-based oil bourse were the real reasons we were in such a rush to invade Iraq. With the war, all the Chinese contracts disappeared, and the potential for a Euro oil bourse evaporated.”

The only way to stop the current war in the Middle East without losing our prestge both domestically and abroad is to never have declared war on the Middle East.

Oy, what a Catch-22.

The Catch-22 of the War in Iraq is that the only sure way to get American troops out of Iraq is to make sure they were never deployed to Iraq in the first place.

After America invested our military power in Iraq and the Middle East, it is improbable that anything less than full commitment will result in anything less than national shame and humiliation akin to that felt post Vietnam.

Wow, if that isn’t an excellent strategy!

Note to self.

In Complete Deniability Through Constant War I quoted Orwell’s writing from Nineteen Eighty-Four II.9. Upon further mulling, I wanted to share that war can be about “taking mountains and winning” or it can be about “domestic crowd control.”

The war on terrorism and the war in Iraq is about domestic crowd control.

Here’s the original quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four II.9, “When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.”

I think that whether there is actually a war going on “over there” or not is immaterial. If we believe there is a mortal threat “over there” there indeed is — its really a brand perception issue — dealing with issues of “hearts and minds” — our domestic, American, hearts, not the Montagnards’.

Now that I am in PR and marketing, I see all things in term of brand perception, and the Orwell quote works with both a “ghost war /” and (as in terrorism or liberating the Iraqis) as it does with “real wars” (as in liberating France from the Nazis).

If a war is about taking mountains and winning, it will be a lot more like WWII — quiet and discree, the welfare of campaigns being of utmost importance.

The goals will be well-defined and well-funded.

If a war is about domestic crowd control, it will be loud, indiscreet, vulnerable to leaks and treasonous acts (without the required penalizations such as firing squads and so forth).

There will be no end in site, no well-defined goals, and funding will always be a struggle.

Gee, I wonder if we are being spun right now when it comes to the polarization that is going on between us “liberal elite” and them “salt of the earth.” What do you think? Maybe? Certainly.

(We liberal elite will never admit to being so hoodwinked — it will indeed be our hubris and ego that will keep us all wrapped up in this tarbaby.)

The war on terrorism and the Iraq War are both domestic crowd control, aren’t they? Seems to me.

How long will Don Quixote fight the windmill?

The Independent has some statistics about the Iraq was that sort of leads the witness. Via Daily Kos.

$204.4 billion: The cost to the U.S of the war so far.
2,339: Allied troops killed
15,955: US troops wounded in action
98: U.K troops killed
30,000 : Estimated Iraqi civilian deaths
0: Number of WMDs found
66: Journalists killed in Iraq.
63: Journalists killed during Vietnam war
8: per cent of Iraqi children suffering acute malnutrition
53,470: Iraqi insurgents killed
67: per cent Iraqis who feel less secure because of occupation
$343: Average monthly salary for an Iraqi soldier. Average monthly salary for an American soldier in Iraq: $4,160.75
5: foreign civilians kidnapped per month
47: per cent Iraqis who never have enough electricity
20: casualties per month from unexploded mines
25-40: per cent Estimated unemployment rate, Nov 2005
251: Foreigners kidnapped
70: per cent of Iraqi’s whose sewage system rarely works
183,000: British and American troops are still in action in Iraq.
13,000: from other nations
90: Daily attacks by insurgents in Nov ’05. In Jun ’03: 8
60-80: per cent Iraqis who are “strongly opposed” to presence of coalition troops

Repost from March 10, 2005: Has anyone checked the label on the prescription that we in the United States have been given to treat permanent tyranny around the world? The side effects are much worse than the cure.

The most important side effect is that until the population of a sovereign nation-state is ready to join the emergent worldwide free market economy, any attempt at imposing either democracy or capitalism will fail once external influence is removed. The blowback from this imposition and resulting failure is that the resulting system will be similar or worse than the preceding system, and when it comes to the global balance of power, the devil you know is always better than the devil you don’t.

On the 13th of February Meet the Press, Natan Sharansky debated Pat Buchanan over the book A Case for Democracy, about which President Bush admits he is passionate and which the White House intends to use as a foreign policy roadmap for the next four years. I have yet to read either Mr. Sharansky’s book or Mr. Buchanan’s controversial response, Where the Right Went Wrong, but I do have an opinion based wholly on the debate and the transcript of the debate.

I found myself in strong agreement with a lot of what Pat Buchanan recommended on foreign policy. For example, “In my judgment, what happened on 9/11 was a result of interventionism. Interventionism is the cause of terror. It is not a cure for terror.”

The President’s premise that domestic terrorism is the direct result of envy, jealousy, or insecurity is flawed. As Pat Buchanan states in the interview, “the United States was not attacked because we are free. Bin Laden was not attacking the Bill of Rights. We were attacked because the United–over here because the United States’ military and political presence is massive over there. Bin Laden in his fatwah, his statement of declaration of war on the United States, said the infidels were standing on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. They want us out of the Middle East. They don’t care whether we have a separation of church and state.”

All systems reject invasion, even our bodies. Even in the case of a transplanted organ which is welcome, one must continue taking medicine for life in order to keep the body from rejecting the invader, even though the invader is pink, healthy, not poisoned and dying like the original. Internationally, it doesn’t matter if our prescription, our pink and healthy liver, our strong heart, is going to cure what ails the world, because that just isn’t the point. Curing the world’s ills requires that we will need to make sure the patient is constantly taking its “for the rest of your life” anti-rejection medications. Even if this is delivered forcibly under restraint, “for your own good” and “it hurts me more than it hurts you.”

One of the obvious outcomes of this stated overt (and not covert) intention “to help democratic institutions in every region in every nation on earth is a formula for permanent war,” says Mr. Buchanan,

Buchanan went on to state very clearly that it is not in America’s best interest to intervene in affairs of sovereign nation-states, governments that are in fact recognized by the world. To again quote Pat Buchanan, paraphrasing John Quincy Adams, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the champion of freedom everywhere, but the vindicator only of her own.”

John Quincy Adams said it better himself, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

When it comes down to it, there is no legal mandate that we as a nation or as a member of the world government may aggressively pursue this sort of agenda. Again, Pat Buchanan, “where in the Constitution do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of countries that do not threaten us and do not attack us? If they don’t, their internal politics are their own business,” adding that “the president of the United States has no constitutional authority to do this.”

And even after all that, one might realize that the only form of government that can in fact be transplanted like an organ is an authoritarian dictatorship. In this case I will intentionally misappropriate Senator Charles Grassey’s quote when he said, in the same episode of Meet the Press, “I think that there’s a movement towards freedom that people are naturally born free, they want to be free, and you don’t impose democracy. Democracy is natural. You can only impose dictatorship.”

Even though we want to believe that all functioning systems need to have an emergent pattern that is democratic, this is not exclusively the case. Governments are really visible manifestations of their culture. There has never really been a long-lasting government that has been out of step with its mother culture. We know that a family’s culture is deep and very difficult to influence. A company’s takes either a lot of time or a total radical amputation to truly change the culture. Since nation-states are in fact artificial constructs anyway, it is almost impossible to make drastic changes without Draconian measures, the majority of which are morally and ethically offensive and more costly than their intended good.

My interpretation on this quote is that a Vanguard of Democracy is as futile as a Vanguard of the Proletariat. That imposing democracy is as futile and as temporary as imposing Marxist-Leninism, communism, capitalism, or even the free market. And when this Vanguard of Democracy and the free market system was imposed on Russia, the blowback was arguably the complete dissolution of realpolitik, resulting in an entire country run by the Russian Mafia in a very effective and complete power grab. Is this democracy? Where is the Nation-State in a country that can’t even contain its nuclear assets? The biggest weak link in the entire underground weapons-grade plutonium economy? A country that has a larger rift between haves and have nots than ever before, A true playground for the neo robber baron. Where the super rich can ignore traffic laws if they posses the official flashing blue lights on their Mercedes-Benz S600 sedans. In the case of Russia, we have a culture that has never known either democracy or freedom, from the Czars to the Communists. On a systemic level, the Russian system broke under this imposition.

And there are a surplus of sovereign governments worldwide unready or unwilling to accept an imposed “freedom,” “democracy” and “the free market” systemically from the top-down. These desires happen in emergence, through bubbling up from the bottom. From discontent, from desire, from education, and through participation in a global market and global economy. By willing hearts and minds legitimately as opposed to through heavy-handed coercion.

So, in that regard, Natan Sharansky’s naive comment, although correct on the surface, is not a very complex argument, “I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom,” What he forgot to mention is that his argument doesn’t include a very important missing piece, which is, “all things being equal.”

I agree with the following premise, “All things being equal, I believe that all the people, when given opportunity to choose between living in fear or living in freedom, choose to live in freedom.” But in developing nations, in nations that are still tribal or predominately rural, in nations that don’t have a history of education or are based on tribalism, monarchy, or religion, and in nations that have high scarcities or are under crushing debt, the resulting unintended consequences of imposing democracy, capitalism, or the free market economy usually results in a situation much worse, or at least much less predictable, than the original. I hate to use “better the devil we know than the devil we don’t” but the jury is out as to whether an Iraq with no boarders and a forced, unnatural, system of government will chomp at the bit until it is given an opportunity to revert to something similar but different.

Again, to quote Pat Buchanan in support of the above — the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t theory of foreign policy, “We cannot make the enemy the best of the good . . . we have had occasions, the last great crusade for democracy was Woodrow Wilson going across the sea with an army to make the world safer. We brought down all the monarchs and we got instead Lenin and Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler.”