I think the fact that Bush is talking about respecting our allies is a joke after the way he handled begining the Iraq war. The Bush administration openly mocked our decades old NATO allies France and Germany with all the "old Europe" comments. Who's flip-flopping?
I think people overlook the fact that we need allies, not for military reasons (we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined), but because we need their cooperation with our intelegence and police work to track down actual terrorists.
We do need to project military force to end state sponsored terrorism. However, Iraq, as we now know, was unable to develop wepons of mass destruction with the sanctions and inspectors. The Bush administration did a great job forcing the inspectors on Saddam again but by starting the Iraq war we weakend our ability to threaten military force on truly dangerous regimes like North Korea, which actually has nuclear weapons and the crazieast leader around, and Iran, which has active nuclear reactors which are as we speak producing (or are at least capable of producing) weapons grade materials. Both these countries know that we are over extended in Iraq and Afganistan and are incapable of any military action against them.
Furthermore by destabilizing Iraq, who we know wasn't actively supporting terrorists, the Bush administration created a haven for terrorists who now have a very convenient place to capture and kill American Citizens and soldiers as well as those of our allies. He now accuses Kerry of flip flopping on the Iraq war when Kerry is just saying that Iraq, while a threat, didn't need to be delt with with military force, but now IS a terrorist threat because of the actions of the bush administration.
Before I get off my soap box I'd like to mention a quote from Mark Twain:
"A Patriot supports his country always, and his government when it deserves it."
This governmernt is bad for the US and doesn't deserve our support.
whew. I appologise to every one whe justs wants to read about engineering on this board but I had to rebutt the other comments on the board.
Brent