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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 05:58am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#61 of 69)

THE KISSINGER CASE – A compelling account of Henry Kissinger’s involvement in Chile, Vietnam and Cambodia, leading to various catastrophic crimes against humanity.
Roger Morris, once a close Kissinger colleague on the National Security Council, is convinced of his guilt.
The program argues that Kissinger was the principal architect of the Vietnam War and personally responsible for the deployment of “weapons of mass destruction” in Vietnam, as well as during the invasion of Cambodia.
In the war in Indo-China 58,000 American soldiers fell in battle and more than 2 million civilians died. Recently released CIA documents indicate that Kissinger could also be responsible for the 1970 assassination of Chile’s army commander General Rene Schneider, designed to facilitate the fall from power of Chile’s newly elected, left-wing president Salvador Allende.
Will Kissinger be forced to answer personally for his deeds, or do the conventions of war crimes apply only to some and not to others?
(From Germany, in English). PG CC
7.30 AS IT HAPPENED: THE KISSINGER CASE

Underlines the absolute failure of the USA Congress throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century!

lchic - 06:14am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#62 of 69)

What financial interests has Kissenger had ... would he have $$interests in the military-complex / Oil ?

I'm interested in:

1. Why minds think the way they do.
2. What motivates those with power.
3. Where their self-interests lie.
4. What sorts of character they are with respect to 'greed' v 'public service'.

rshow55 - 06:21am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#63 of 69)

The Kissinger case, and the very close involvement of Kissinger with the stable of experts and notables in CSIS, including Sam Nunn, offer some very good reason for people, both in America, and elsewhere in the world, to check US "establishment opinion" for bias, or worse.

The questions in lchic 3/2/02 6:14am are worth considering for every individual in CSIS, and other distinguished organizations - - and the "missile defense" fraud-boondoggle offers very good evidence of how very far from technical decency or reasonable good judgement the "establishment" can be.

In the case of Kissinger, Friedman's quote saying that Kissinger can "make Machiavelli seem like one of the angels of mercy" is worth remembering.

lchic - 06:28am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#64 of 69)

The families of the dead remember !

rshow55 - 06:41am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#65 of 69)

They do, and we should remember, too.

Thomas L Friedman's review of Kissenger's Does America Need a Foreign Policy http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kissinger-01policy.html ...is titled suggesting an over-simplified, incomplete model - beautiful in some ways, ugly in other ways:

Friedman titles the review

How to Run the World in Seven Chapters http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/17/reviews/010617.17friedmt.html

The piece includes this:

" What was said of ''The Prince,'' as Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. of Harvard University explains in his translation, will no doubt be said by critics of Kissinger. Mansfield wrote: ''Soon after being published in 1532,'' Machiavelli's book ''was denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and as a recommendation of tyranny, giving rise to the hateful term 'Machiavellian.' '' Kissinger's book is not a recommendation for tyranny in any way, but it is very ''Kissingerian'' -- focused more around power balances, stability and national interests than American values. I have no doubt that Kissinger is as cynical, mean and nasty a bureaucratic infighter and player of the game of nations as his most venomous critics have charged. At times, he can make Machiavelli sound like one of the Sisters of Mercy. But having said that, one can still value the clarity of his thinking, which is fully on display here.

One can value that clarity, from one perspective, and find it ugly indeed if you are almarst , or looking at things from the perspective of many other countries.

From Lchic: "Machiavelli - that scheming little prince of darkness -- from a country that still seems much the same today.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/rosso.htm

http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Syllabi/ns_4036.html

It seems to me that, in nuclear policy, the Vietnam War, and much else, the United States, behaving in "Kissingerian" fashion -- really was as ugly and blood-curdling as Friedman suggests.

We should stop behaving that way.

If we did, getting accomodations on the objectives of missile defense would be a matter of course -- whatever those accomodations were. They'd happen by simple negotiation.

It would be good for all concerned to become clear on how technically corrupt the "missile defense" boondoggle has become. Negotiations and accomodations based on lies are unstable.

lchic - 07:20am Mar 2, 2002 EST (#66 of 69)

Roger MORRIS The Kissenger Case investigated and checked.

What he found was that Kissenger _forgot the _forgot truth of diplomatic _lies happenings _forgot and substituted _lies sequences _lies placing himself in a more favourable light.

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