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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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almarst2003
- 05:50am Mar 25, 2003 EST (#
10462 of 10465)
Recomend to read. And read. And read again.
Perhaps Hollywood is saying what Washington can't -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;$sessionid$Z2I0HSGHFBWSBQFIQMFSFFWAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2003/03/25/do2501.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/03/25/ixportal.html
By David Hare.
It has been one of the least attractive features of the
past few weeks that Europeans have been encouraged in the
illusion that they are considering the implications of the
current invasion of Iraq more seriously than citizens in
America.
Ten days ago, when the Los Angeles Times Book Review
announced a debate about the war in a downtown 1,800-seat
theatre, the event was sold out within hours. The resulting
arguments achieved a level of deep knowledge and
sophistication that has not been matched, at least to my ears,
in any public forum in Britain.
For anyone like me who has spent a good deal of the past
month travelling across America, the intensity of national
divisions has been something of a revelation. Because we often
depend for our view of America on vacuous news programmes
produced by cowed and grovelling networks that have become an
embarrassment to the serious profession of journalism, we are
presented with a parody of a country that is falling dutifully
in behind its warmongering president. In fact, 1,000
protesters were arrested in San Francisco last Thursday alone
- the greatest number on any public subject in the past 20
years.
The weight of opinion, at least on the surface, may indeed
be differently balanced on the American continent than it is
in Europe and Asia. But time spent talking on the streets, in
bars and in private houses leaves you with the impression of a
population that knows, at every level, just how radical and
incendiary the philosophy of the pre-emptive strike will, in
the long term, prove to be.
People are not at ease. They know as well as any foreigner
that regime change in Iraq has nothing to do with September
11, and they bitterly resent the insult to their intelligence
implicit in the elisions of politicians who try, and fail, to
make the link.
Even those who support Bush in his aims are appalled by his
methods. The swaggering pleasure in proclaiming the
irrelevance of international organisations seems, at the very
least, unnecessary and unwise, a certain means of storing up
big-time trouble for the day when America tries to move back
towards more collaborative aims.
If, in Donald Rumsfeld's chilling words, "the mission
defines the coalition, and not the coalition the mission",
then what meaning does friendship have? The careless pursuit
of what we may remember as the Fawn Hall doctrine ("Sometimes
you have to go above the written law") is not making anyone
happy.
The true anti-Americanism is that of leaders who pretend
that electors can be bullied into a new and dangerous foreign
policy without even stopping to think.
In all this, of course, it has suited everybody's purposes
to direct attention from the doubtful legitimacy of the
invasion itself to the question of whether it is tasteful to
proceed with a shameless and self-advertising Oscar ceremony
when the world is going to war.
Would there not, it was asked, be something offensive about
actors disporting themselves on red carpets at the very moment
when George W Bush had begun to plump up the 20,000 body bags
that he has ordered, fit for purpose?
Underlying the question is an interesting ambivalence. No
country has done more to propagate and render ubiquitous what
is known as celebrity culture. But like drunks, waking in the
gutter and resolving not to drink again, American commentators
have suddenly been eager to declare that the highest-rung rite
of celebrity - which their own media have lovingly created,
and which the advertisers have made hugely profitable - should
be cancelled as being no longer appropriate to the new
dispensation.
As someone caught up by chance in this year's odd
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