On the subject of the world's perception of the US I think the invasion of Iraq was a giant mistake in so many ways; no weapons of mass destruction ever found, did we really have to send giant salvos of cruise missiles to try to wipe out Hussein's living quarters, etc. etc. We made ourselves very unpopular in so many ways. The war has been so costly in so many ways in terms of money and human lives and is Iraq more stable now or was it more stable when Hussein was ruling.

I remember before the invasion happened there were politicians saying it is not our policy to assassinate any foreign leader but what were we doing at the start of the war. We were basically trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein using cruise missiles. Why not try to do so in the traditionaly way instead? It's less costly in terms of human lives lost and monetary cost and there's not so much collateral damage. I'm not saying I'm for assassinations but I'm saying that a typical assassination would be a lesser of evils in this case. If it succeeded then that would probably have destabilized Iraq as the war has so who knows what would happen. We could have just kept a very close eye on Hussein and if he ever started to misbehave like when he had Kuwait invaded then we could take action. The United States was the aggressor in the war on Iraq. That aggressive policy I think made us very unpopular in the eyes of the world. Pardon me for going off on another tangent.