What's also very frustrating is that there are many Americans who will travel abroad, get an earful of Bush- and U.S.-hatred, and then become convinced that Bush must be doing something wrong since the rest of the world supposedly hates him.

As I emailed a friend in New Zealand today, we should tell these international opiners that their reactionary comments are what liberals in the U.S. would call "intollerant" and "narrow-minded."

Good for Prager. One of my favorites: the same week Jimmy Carter got the Nobel Peace prize for arranging peace with North Korea it blew up. The very same week the N Koreans admitted that they had been cheating all along. Did it bother the "peace" people? Not at all. Because Jimmy had good intentions. The fact that what he put together was a failure from the day it was signed didn't matter.

The problem with the notion of "world opinion" is that there is no such thing.

When some refer to "world opinion," they mean either old European socialist elites or wannabe revolutionaries in Third World countries.

It is time to face the facts. The vast majority of nation-states in the world are not run by what I would call representative forms of government. At best they are dominated by entrenched socialist bureaucracies (France, for example) or by outright totalitarian regimes (Libya, for example). Many are, of course, somewhere in between.

To "submit to world opinion" would not be to heed the call of humanity, but to kowtow to these interests that are, many times, in direct conflict with those of the United States, unarguably the most free nation on the planet.

It is for the same reason that I oppose American participation in the so-called International Court of Justice. Proponents can coopt all kinds of language of "humanity," but I dare them -- would they be willing to proffer their spouses and children to a court headed by an anti-American Syrian judge to give a fair shake to the judicial proceedings? I think not.