If the Democrats really had the best interests of the United States and the world in mind, they could have attached to the $87 billion for Iraq another few billion to be used exclusively for finding new and viable sources of energy for ours and other energy-greedy products of the industrial age. I don't think this war could be avoided, or should have been avoided, in the current state of the world, but I do think that getting the United States off its middle east oil dependency could go a long way to creating a lasting peace in the area. Look at it this way: No more billions in oil sales, and Saddam, for instance, would not have had the money to pay his lackeys and probably would not have been able to control as much as he did. No more oil billions, and the tyrannical leaders of the region lose a lot of leverage. You would no longer have countries like France trying to play both sides, attempting to look good to the world and keep their oil contracts at the same time. I truly feel this oil dependence hamstrongs both our efforts at world peace our ability to expand the human race into the universe. Not that space shuttles and the like run on regular unleaded, but the transports that carry building materials to whever they build space vehicles use oil. The people that drive to work use oil, and the very fact that there is so much disunity in the world due to oil distracts anyone from a true effort at colonization. So let's take a page from John Gault and find a new source of portable energy to use. Gault, by the way, was one of the men of productivity in Atlas Shrugged, and he discovered a method of taking the ambient energy floating all around us all the time and turning into useable energy.