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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 - 09:54pm Mar 19, 2003 EST (# 10234 of 10235)
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.

Some arguments are over - some decisions are made - now an invasion is happening.

. D-Day by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/19/opinion/19FRIE.html

Whatever else happens, American soldiers won't want for immediate material support, in the ways that were so disastrous in 1917 -

. Mesopotamia .....1917 by Rudyard Kipling http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee74d94/3625

though plans can go wrong.

The Bush administration, intentionally or not - may be getting the world much better organized than it has been. If the world does not want the US to be "the world's policeman" it has to organize itself to do some better policing in other ways. The Treaty of Westphalia was a long time ago.

8830 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9rY7aQkR5Ye.244367@.f28e622/10356

8832 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9rY7aQkR5Ye.244367@.f28e622/10358

8833 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9rY7aQkR5Ye.244367@.f28e622/10359

I hope things go well - in this war - and more broadly. For the whole world. I think that's possible. That will only be possible if people, all over the world, figure out what makes decent sense to them - get right answers - not only in terms of their immediate emotions, but in terms of facts and relations that fit together, and negotiate well enough, often enough.

I'm concerned, but hopeful.

I started this year with rshow55 - 8:20am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7177 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9rY7aQkR5Ye.244367@.f28e622/8700 :

" I think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance. 10124 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9rY7aQkR5Ye.244367@.f28e622/11669

With war within hours, days at most - that seems a very bad call. But maybe not.

It seems to me that all it would take, from where we are, would be military results that favor the US-UK forces reasonably cleanly - and negotiations and operations thereafter that fully satisfy Tony Blair, and are consistent with his promises. Along with sensible negotiations by others - about at the level of sophistication, effort, and good faith that we've seen at the Security Council since November.

Maybe that's too much of a miracle to ask for. But maybe not.

But, by historical standards - say the standards of fifty or a hundred years ago, while some things have gone badly, a lot of things are going surprisingly well. From Oct 2000 to April 2001, Dawn Riley and I headed a thread featured by the Guardian on its Middle East news page - the thread was titled Emotional Peace in the Middle East . That thread dealt almost exclusively with the Israeli - Palestinian mess. . There was an enormous amount of inflamatory language, indeed exterminatory language, on that thread - and all over Israel, Palestine, and the whole middle east. There was great difficulty in seeing any way to closure then. And we're not so near any workable closure yet.

All the same, I've been surprised, and very pleased, by a basic fact, cited in U.N. Envoy Sees Hope for Mideast Peace By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Mideast.html Filed at 7:03 p.m. ET

Two and a half years of violence has claimed 2,224 lives on the Palestinian side and 753 on the Israeli side of the conflict and left thousands more wounded.

By historical standards, that's a stunningly low body count - and a stunningly low incidence of wounding - given the situation as it has been, and the things that have been said. There have been plenty of crazy and a

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