A preemptive moon strike against the unstable, sneaky, ungrateful and dangerous

Tony Long's story in Wired News is barking up exactly the same tree as George Bush and his out of this world plans. The article even compared Bush to "some latter-day Mongol warlord, ... eagerly extending American might to its absolute limits.". It also quoted Bart Gordon a Tennessee Democrat who in a December interview with the New York Post said:

We don't want to wake up too late one day and say, 'Uh-oh.' We don't want somebody else to get there first. We need to have our base there. We need to be the chairman of the board.

The article then goes on to say:

The justification for lunar hegemony is preemptive. We want to prevent the unstable Russians, the sneaky Japanese, the ungrateful French and -- especially -- the dangerous Chinese from gettin' the drop on us.

So basically one interpretation is that NASA has just unwittingly become the weapon for a preemptive strike to annex the moon before the unstable, sneaky, ungrateful and dangerous hordes elsewhere in the world get there. Let me remind you of what JKF said on the subject of the original race to the moon:

Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

So simultaneously he affirmed the policy of preemptive colonizing for peace, while warning of the dangers of repeating prior mistakes made when doing just that.

Echoing Long's comment, wouldn't the best way to avoid repeating previous mistakes be to fulfill the spirit of Armstrong's first words when stepping onto the moon. We should make the project to return to the moon an international one, just like the space station, and truely make it another "giant leap for mankind" and not just another preemptive strike for America. As such Bush's announcement could have been used a great and famous first step to all of America's disruptive foreign policies of the previous three years and truely unite all nations across the world in a shared mission to put mankind on the moon.

Could have been... Sigh. But don't forget this is the long dark tea-time of the soul.