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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?

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rshow55 - 08:18am Mar 16, 2003 EST (# 10058 of 10060)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Contrary to what gisterme says, there isn't much evidence that anybody much loves Saddam - surely in the Security Council. There's evidence that people care for international order.

9927 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.V1p1aCB5540.2138906@.f28e622/11469 includes passages I hope people read, that seem over-hopeful two days later, and includes this:

" If I were voting, just now, I'd vote with Prime Minister Blair. That is, if I had to hand anybody a proxy that matters to vote on these issues - I'd hand it to him. Blair's making decisions most coherently of any of the principles, so far as I can see. Maybe he's wrong in key spots. So are all the other players - one place or another. He's honest. He's a good negotiator. He's responsible, and being held responsible."

Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar are leaders - responsible to many people under them - expected to make good decisions. They will be meeting with President Bush. They need to judge, and judge well, what it means to put so much of their fate, and the fate of the world, in his hands - without effective controls. The size and staffing of the meeting, in itself, offers evidence that there are grave problems.

rshow55 - 08:19am Mar 16, 2003 EST (# 10059 of 10060)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

This editorial is worth printing in full here - especially for those who have read postings here in the last few days.

The Summit of Isolation http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/opinion/16SUN2.html

"Three men meeting on an Atlantic island seems an apt symbol for the failure of the Bush administration to draw the world around its Iraq policy. That's not the intended message of President Bush's meeting today in the Azores with Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar of Spain, but it's hard to avoid that impression. In what appears to be the final days before an American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush is taking time to consult with two loyal allies and, ostensibly, to decide if any realistic chance remains for a new United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq. But the underlying diplomatic reality is bleak. Only a little more than four months since a unanimous Security Council backed American demands for disarming Saddam Hussein, Washington's only sure council supporters are Britain, Spain and Bulgaria.

"President Bush was dealt a bad hand by others. Baghdad refused to provide the active cooperation that alone could have brought inspections to a swift and successful conclusion. France has created enormous problems through its unwillingness to back up inspections with tight deadlines and a credible threat of force.

"But the Bush administration's erratic and often inept diplomacy has made matters immeasurably worse. By repeatedly switching its goals from disarmament to regime change to broadly transforming the Middle East, and its arguments from weapons to Al Qaeda to human rights, the White House made many countries more worried about America's motives than Iraq's weapons. Public arm-twisting of allies like Turkey and Mexico backfired, as did repeated sniping at Hans Blix, one of the U.N.'s two chief arms inspectors.

"Just this past week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld damagingly suggested that Washington didn't really need British military help, administration diplomats unhelpfully hedged their support for a British compromise proposal and Secretary of State Colin Powell further undercut London's efforts to win over undecided Security Council members by suggesting that Washington might soon withdraw the pending resolution without a vote.

"Even now, diplomacy might be resuscitated if the administration made an all-out effort to seek broad consensus around the British concept of disarmament benchmarks and specific, achievable deadlines. Such an effort would require much greater American willingness to negotiate realistic deadlines and credible mechanisms for measuring Iraqi compliance than has yet been evident.

"Instead, the Bush administration now gives every appearance of going through the motions of diplomacy as a favor to Mr. Blair without really believing in it. By allowing that perception to grow, Mr. Bush finds himself about to embark on an uncertain course of war and nation-building in one of the world's most dangerous and complex regions, with an alliance far too narrow for comfort.

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