[mburbank]

Woah! Jump back, Shach!

Sue, Powell's line was, depending on what angle you shoose to view it from, correct, I think it was just as glib as anything that Jeanette said.

I also am suspicious where a source isn't given, particularly concidering that "It got very quite in the room" nonsense. This is a piece of a piece, obviously written with a desired impact in mind. Structurally it reminds me of those scenes in "Dragnet" where Joe Friday would fire off a succint, tart reply to a self righteous criminial, who would then get that "Oh, my God! He's right" expression and then look down in shame and guilt.

I think, on the whole, folks here were making fun of the staged nature of the writting, it's canned quality. I also think Powell's quote itself was highly debateable.

And I take issue with your idea that we 'stood nothing to gain' in the wars you sight. Had we won the decisive victories we hoped for, it would have put points on the cold war scoreboard. All the brush wars were a fight against Communism as a whole as we saw it at the time. Land was not the objective, but hegemony and the widening of our "Sphere of Influence" surely was. We were looking for a wee bbit more than land to bury our dead on. We were looking to choose who ran the country, who they traded with, who's proxy they became in a wider, manichean conflict. I think powells line was a deliberate simplification of America's style of proxy colonialsim meant to play for a media audince and not whomever he may have been speaking to.