—“I hate to be negative, but look at the world champion and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. His personal popularity made him California’s governor, but he was nearly powerless against the entrenched Democratic legislators who held the real power in the state. Or look at Indira Gandhi. She was a popular leader until she tried to accomplish what her country needed most—population reduction. Then she was out.”

—“When I think of total power I think of the International Olympic Committee. It is its own entity. It chooses representatives in most countries. It is not the countries that choose their representatives to the IOC. The IOC is a centralized power. Rights are given to those whom it decides can have rights. Under apartheid the IOC did not let South African teams compete. So it was ‘international’ only when it wanted to be.

“Then let’s look at the military. Looking at countries today we see that the United States spends the most on keeping its military power strong. It spends over $600 billion a year. Compare that with China’s $85 billion or Japan’s $46 billion. Then look at the world’s nuclear warheads. The U.S. has at least 9,500, Russia 9000, France at least 300, China a minimum of 250, UK 200, India and Pakistan possibly 100 each, and Israel at least 100. That’s enough bomb power to blow up the Earth, the moon and Mars! So the U.S. as a nation has power—at least military power. Thank God there is only one US or the human race would have been wiped out years ago.”

—“Getting back to our country, America had the power to eliminate Saddam. But was it actually good to invade Iraq to rid the Iraqis of Saddam, to find weapons of mass destruction, to secure the oil production for the West and to bring democracy to the country? The cost to Americans was over four thousand lives and an estimated eventual total cost of over two trillion dollars, if we include the total eventual costs of veterans’ pensions, health care and so forth. Then the Iraqis lost well over a hundred thousand lives, possibly two hundred thousand. Then there was the losing of the ‘political face’ of the U.S. Another negative was that the terrorists got a foothold and a learning experience to bring back to their own countries to increase global terrorism. From a political point of view, was the intention good? Possibly. Were the results bad? Yes! So as a political technique the Iraq war was a negative for America.”