[CleanedStar]

This piece is so awful, no wonder it's a Wall Street Journal op-ed...the WSJ is a good paper, but its editorial page was always screwy, even before Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal.

Woolsey of course does what you'd expect - when caught in government/corporate espionage, he throws up whatever dirt was found out to change the subject. His examples are a laugh. Bribing Brazilian officials? Woolsey and his cronies had been working to keep Brazil a dictatorship until 15 years before he wrote this piece. Saudi corruption? Woolsey had worked it along with his companions so that the US had its army occupying Saudi Arabia in 2000 against the will of most Saudis, who lived and still live under a US-backed dictatorship. It took a plane through the Pentagon and two through the WTC to get the US occupation out of Saudi Arabia.

Then he has contempt for the "statist" Airbus. How is Airbus more statist than Boeing, which is completely dependent on the government dole, to manufacture aircraft which most strategic planners say are not of much use in the modern type guerrilla wars the US is now working to counter?

Europe has always been a laboratory for innovative technology - Linux, MySQL, SuSE, QT, Rovio, SAP, Siemens, CERN and the world wide web. Eastern Europe is a treasure trove of technical talent, if not established technical companies. It's possible the Bay Area is the ultimate destination for much tech monetization - even US cities bemoan this. But plenty of technology gets invented in Europe.