On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:46:11 +1000, Oz1
wrote:

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 00:25:09 GMT, "jlrogers" wrote:

No, you don't get it. Our government manufactured nothing. At worst
they didn't look too closely at some evidence presented by sworn
witnesses.

Oh really! Lets see now what was the name of that little girly that
was shot and beaten by her Iraqi captors after firing at them to evade
capture? You know the same little girly who the Iraqi doctors tried to
hand back but weren't able to because the troops were too scared to
let them close enough.

hey can also be accused of assuming the worst case
scenario. Which is the smart thing to do.

Yeah sure, that works every time, maybe Kennedy should have listened
to his advisors and launched a pre emptive nuke strike on Cuba?
But then you'd have nowhere to keep your Prisoners of Undeclared war
out of sight.

You run your country and we'll run ours.

Hey it works fine for me!
Pity we are working toward a free trade agreement with you guys
that'll give you too much input into our politics

Now, that's just plain stupid. Australia is too small to play trade
wars with the EEC and the USA. The Asian economies aren't doing much
for us either and are locking us out of agricultural exports to
protect their domestic sector.

We gain more from a FTA with the USA than we lose provided we get some
agreement on agricultural products. If we don't, there's no reason why
we should bother with an FTA - the USA doesn't make much that we can't
source elsewhere and a series of bilateral FTAs like the NZ and
Singapore models may well be better for us.

The USA already has a lot of input into our politics the same as we do
for NZ and for the same reasons - economic leverage.

Peter Wiley