Dear George,

It has occurred to me that the focus of the campaigns on both sides was in a wrong direction. Why were the "decideds" calling the "undecideds"? It''s like a rugby scrum, one opinion versus two teams fighting for the ball. Why don't the "decideds" call the "decideds" and try to have a conversation?

It seemed appropriate for every Democrat voting for Kerry to reach out and call a Republican they know might be voting for Bush. Why are you voting for Bush? There seemed to be a determined desire to not look at the facts, from my point of view, by Republicans voting for Bush. No calamity, failure, or revelation of wrong doing seemed to shake their base. This was curious to me. Actually incredible.

So I called my Republican friend, to ask him why he was voting for Bush.

He was non-religious and not interested in what he considered "fringe" issues that the Republican Party had adopted to "buy" the Christian Right: namely gay marriage and abortion. These had nothing to do with real leadership and were distraction issues. We agreed. I thought this would go well. My friend was very logical.

His description of his feelings for Kerry were almost identical to my description of my feelings for Bush. Neither of us believed the other's candidate had an ounce of integrity. I asked him to explain how he reconciled himself with the war in Iraq and how we got into it. Didn't he feel deceived?

Here we discovered the core of our disagreement and at the core was the most fundamental vision of what makes good leadership. He clearly believed and stated that we had not been agressive ENOUGH in Iraq. We should have fire bombed Fallujah and taught "those people" a lesson. He explained, "If they didn't know the Americans were better for them than Hussein they were just stupid and they deserved to lose anything they had lost."

He went on to describe a vision of America in the world that was borrowed from the Sopranos. He viewed the world as a collection of crime families. We weren't a giant mob family and we would rub our any samller families that didn't rise up and play ball with us.

He described Clinton's error of going into Kosovo - sure it was humanitarian but we didn't have a stake in the game. We had no power to gain. Bad use of military force.We should use the military when we have something to gain.

My colleague was refreshing. He was being totally honest. His moral center was clear - America's responsibility was to dominate the world and if we didn't we were in for it. No one else in the world had the right to as much as we did. He stated that Omar Khaddafi was an example to the rest of the Middle East. He knew we were going to take him out of power, so he agreed to host military units in his country. Smart move. He was playing ball.

Leadership in his mind meant sending out a message that if you mess with us we'll mess with you. The oil didn't belong to the Iraqis in the first place. That was one of our big mistakes of the past - it's our oil - we found it with our technology and we're the ones that use it the most, we deserve to take it and they're lucky we share it with them. We should never have allowed them to keep the money from buying the oil. Now they've just bought weapons with it.

When I asked, "well weren't many of the weapons purchased from America?"

Well if they were, he said, it was a fair trade of money coming back into our economy that we should have kept from them in the first place. From his point of view we were lucky Gore wasn't President because he probably wouldn't have taken Afghanistan. The only thing "these people" understood was full scale violence. That was how Hussein had ruled and we were going to have to do othe same thing. Kerry didn't have the stomach for it, he said.

I agreed with him. I thought Kerry was more likely to be a peace maker and to lead nations of the world in a unified interest to find solutions to global problems in a peaceful way rather than trying to dominate and threaten the world.

What's good for America is good for the world, my friend replied.

My colleague was convinced that morality had no part of governing - it was only about strategy to keep the best situation for us, regardless of the pain hardship and bloodshed it might cause others. He said he wasn't in favor of random killing because innocent people might die, but he hoped we would bomb the mosques.

I shared that I disagreed with him. I believed that the above attitude toward other countries only provoked violence. Controlling with violence was a misstep and a very mistaken choice as a leader.

When we ended the conversation, we agreed to communicate more through e-mails. The entire conversation was polite, rarely a raised word. Clearly these were two very stark differences of opinion about how human beings should behave toward one another.

There was no middle ground between us. There were two choices. There really were. He believed America looked out for the greater good of all by looking out for the greater good of themselves.

Surely there was a danger in this imperialist thinking. It has preceded the demise of every large society in the history of mankind.

Still, I say - call a Republican. Honest conversation is the greatest freedom we have.

Yours,

Joe Clancy (electronic mail, October 28, 2004)