have you guys even seen john howard? i mean comon, who's gonna be intimidated by little little prick? the whole reasoning behind threating us is that big bad johnny happily does whatever bush says, no questions asked. So d******* peng rightfully concludes that threating australia is also threating the usa, BUT, not directly, so he gets away with it. i doubt that the **cough** "alliance" **cough** is going to do anything other than blockades and air bombings. Why? Simply because the north koreans WILL fight to the death, and WILL NOT run away like the arabs. Added to this, their crahzy a** leader wouldnt even bat an eyelid at launching nukes at USA, Japan and Australia because he knows that there would be no nuclear retaliation. im also thinking that all the attention being focused on the korens now, although rightfully, is due to the fact that they aint found jack in iraq and they need something else to blow up. I mean sure, they got rid of saddam, but at what cost? They are loosing more soliders now then when they were "invading" and all the s***s (my bad shiats) are taking over. And we all know what happens when fundamentalists take over (see afaghanistan) so in conclusion, peng can do whatever the hell he wants because the "alliance" (yeah sure) took to long in stopping is r&d and mass buying of nukes. Why? Well America is quite simply a long way away from them and they (the gov'ment) dont really care what happens to other countries. Remember that all this talk and acts of war started when America itself was attacked, dont get me wrong, it was a terrible terrible tragedy and us Aussies have also had tragedies, but if America, as the worlds last superpower, doesnt really care what happens to smaller countries then of course other "rougue" states are gonna take advantage of this. So there you have it, my rant on the state of the world at the moment. But my biggest problem is when people think of Australia as a puppet, which at the moment is what it looks like, to America. Consider this, John Howard and his government jumped head first into war with no facts, minimum intelligance data and misguided beliefs at the drop of George Bush's hat. That my friends, is stupid.