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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 - 08:41am Mar 17, 2003 EST (# 10116 of 10119)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

......

"" The American people have thus been deliberately lied to, their interests cynically misrepresented and misreported, the real aims and intentions of this private war of Bush the son and his junta concealed with complete arrogance. Never mind that Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, all of them unelected officials who work for unelected Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, have for some time openly advocated Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the cessation of the Oslo process, have called for war against Iraq (and later Iran), and the building of more illegal Israeli settlements in their capacity (during Netanyahu's successful campaign for prime minister in 1996) as private consultants to him, and that that has become US policy now.

Never mind that Israel's iniquitous policies against Palestinians, which are reported only at the ends of articles (when they are reported at all) as so many miscellaneous civilian deaths, are never compared with Saddam's crimes, which they match or in some cases exceed, all of them, in the final analysis, paid for by the US taxpayer without consultation or approval. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been wounded seriously in the last two years, and about 2,500 killed wantonly by Israeli soldiers who are instructed to humiliate and punish an entire people during what has become the longest military occupation in modern history.

Never mind that not a single critical Arab or Muslim voice has been seen or heard on the major American media, liberal, moderate, or reactionary, with any regularity at all since the preparations for war have gone into their final phase. Consider also that none of the major planners of this war, certainly not the so-called experts like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, neither of whom has so much as lived in or come near the Arab world in decades, nor the military and political people like Powell, Rice, Cheney, or the great god Bush himself, know anything about the Muslim or Arab worlds beyond what they see through Israeli or oil company or military lenses, and therefore have no idea what a war of this magnitude against Iraq will produce for the people actually living there.

And consider too the sheer, unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his assistants. Asked to testify to a largely somnolent Congress about the war's consequences and costs they are allowed to escape without giving any concrete answers, which effectively dismisses the evidence of the army chief of staff who has spoken of a military occupation force of 400,000 troops for 10 years at a cost of almost a trillion dollars.

Democracy traduced and betrayed, democracy celebrated but in fact humiliated and trampled on by a tiny group of men who have simply taken charge of this republic as if it were nothing more than, what, an Arab country? It is right to ask who is in charge since clearly the people of the United States are not properly represented by the war this administration is about to loose on a world already beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure more. And Americans have been badly served by a media controlled essentially by a tiny group of men who edit out anything that might cause the government the slightest concern or worry. As for the demagogues and servile intellectuals who talk about war from the privacy of their fantasy worlds, who gave them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions of people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims and Arabs? What American, except for this small unrepresentative group, is seriously interested in increasing the world's already ample stores of anti-Americanism? Hardly any I would suppose.

Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/628/op2.htm

lchic - 08:44am Mar 17, 2003 EST (# 10117 of 10119)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Note

""And consider too the sheer, unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his assistants. Asked to testify to a largely somnolent Congress about the war's consequences and costs they are allowed to escape without giving any concrete answers ...

see above

lchic - 08:54am Mar 17, 2003 EST (# 10118 of 10119)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Future looks bleak for Iraq's fragile environment

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993491

To date, no government or UN agency has assessed the environmental damage that might arise. This is odd, says Ian Willmore of Friends of the Earth. "Both the US and British governments argue that they have balanced the risks of invasion against those of not invading. The environment has to be part of that."

Environmental scientists and non-governmental organisations are also fighting shy of forecasts, but few doubt the impact will be dramatic. "The Gulf war showed that such conflicts have devastating effects on the environment, biodiversity and quality of life, long after the cessation of hostilities," says Michael Rands, chief executive of Cambridge-based conservation alliance BirdLife International.

Acid rain

In 1991, Saddam's retreating forces sabotaged more than 600 Kuwaiti oil wells, which burned for up to nine months. The fumes acidified rain and Kuwait City experienced darkness at noon.

Oil also spilled into the Gulf, creating the largest ever marine slick. It didn't wipe out marine life as some had predicted - partly thanks to $700 million spent on mopping it up and partly because the warm waters of the Gulf sped up the oil's natural breakdown. Even so, local prawn fisheries were damaged for years.

Probably the worst problem was one nobody foresaw. Some 60 million barrels of oil poured into the deserts of Kuwait and formed oil lakes covering 49 square kilometres. From there, the oil slowly percolated down into aquifers and has now poisoned 40 per cent of the underground water - in a country with less water per head than any other.

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