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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    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.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (10461 previous messages)

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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