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Thank you very much for your thoughtful, well-written reply. I asked some deliberately provocative (although not insincere) questions, and you gave us some very good answers.

I'm not sure that the relative freedom South Korea enjoys today was worth the extraordinarily high price WE had to pay for it, since the benefits -- both economic and political -- to the United States seem dubious to me.

I have been critical of the Gulf War, because -- again -- we paid too high a price for too small a victory. I would feel very differently if the first President Bush had not failed to finish the job and bring down Saddam Hussein then and there. Caving in to the, I think, foolish notion that the UN has some sort of jurisdiction over our policies has always struck me as pusillanimous.

I truly believe that if we're going to prosecute a war, we should never try to do so with half measures. look at the mess we're in today, most probably BECAUSE Bush I didn't FINISH the job.

Grenada? I left that out, because it was such a pushover, I suppose. I'm certainly not sorry we did it.

I was a vigorous and outspoken supporter of Admiral Poindexter, General Secord and Colonel North during the Iran Contra Affair. I sent each of them considerable sums of money and wrote countless letters to newspapers, magazines, Senators and Representatives on their behalf. The nakedly political attempt by the Demonrats to destroy Ronald Reagan's presidency over this trumped up issue struck me as contemptible at the time. Nothing that has been written subsequently has changed my mind on that.

My views on Iraq differ from yours ONLY in that I truly believe we ought to clean our OWN house -- by first sealing our borders, and then deporting, excluding and disempowering Muslims and their apologists from any sort of participation in American society, until the conflict is resolved in our favor.

By leaving our homeland virtually undefended and sending a large number of our troops abroad, we MAY be leaving ourselves wide open to further attack here at home. That is why I think we may be putting the cart before the horse in going after Saddam.

By that line of reasoning it is both too late -- and too EARLY -- to wage war on Iraq.