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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 - 08:24am Apr 3, 2002 EST (#1026 of 1035)

Ariel Sharon's operation will succeed only if it is designed to make the Israeli-occupied territories safe for Israel to leave as soon as possible (Friedman 3Ap)

Thread headers in Guardian Talk include :

• Israel Simply Has No Right to Exist
  
• Does "Foreign" mean non-Israeli?
• The stupidity of Mr. Bush in not condemning Sharon's stormtrooper raids (WAR) is mindboggling- diplomatically speaking- and shortsighted in the extreme
  
• "The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life."
  An Invoice For Terror
  
• The Arab Peace offer - how will Israel respond?
  
• Israel is doing a genocide
  
• Now Israel has begun attacking Christian symbols - is now the time for America's right wing to start smelling the stink of their own hypocrisy? http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1908000/1908600.stm

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An increasing feeling that the imposition of a 'culture' onto Palestine in 1948 was a 'wrong decision'.

_{Could 2.8 million be easily absorbed into say the Appalachian mountains - by their ally USA - if that were the only solution.
(0.7M of 3.5M are Arab)
Give the 8.7 million Palestinians their land back.}

rshow55 - 11:01am Apr 3, 2002 EST (#1027 of 1035)

People are paying attention. Sometimes, when things get so bad that people HAVE to solve problems -- they do so. Sometimes the resolutions are very good.

This time, solutions involve facing some very hard truths, some even harder than those set out in Friedman's The Hard Truth http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/03/opinion/03FRIE.html today.

We have to "connect some dots" -- and acknowledge some facts about human beings - enough to do better than we've done. The Middle East, for all the agony, has shown some reasons for hope -- by 20th century standards, the number of deaths have been, though each is a wrenching tragedy, small. And people are working, thinking hard, to contain conflict. I've found this chapter well worth reading now:

'Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century' by ROBERT S. McNAMARA and JAMES G. BLIGHT

" As we look back from the 21st century on the events of the 20th, we cannot help being struck by the enormity of the human carnage . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/books/chapters/29-1stmcnam.html

MD943-944 rshow55 3/29/02 4:49pm

At the beginning of the 20th century, people made "good" arguments that war was becoming obsolete -- for what seemed "good reasons" - that have proven grotesquely wrong. Are those same "good reasons" -- along with a relatively few new insights, and new technical capacities, more reasonable now? Yes, they are more reasonable.

Reasonable enough?

They'd better be.

lchic - 12:22pm Apr 3, 2002 EST (#1028 of 1035)

Old Solution : peace pipe

rshow55 - 12:36pm Apr 3, 2002 EST (#1029 of 1035)

lchic 4/3/02 5:34am

In the Middle East someone has to say "STOP!"

As with NUKES someone has to say "ENOUGH!"

There are plenty of bad, true things to say about the Bush administration, and I've said some of them. Plenty of bad, true things to say about many other people and governments -- more than enough to go around.

Even so, the problems of peace and prosperity have been worked on, and enormous efforts expended by able, committed people, for a long time. There are moral issues, and emotional issues, and they are important. But if the only problems were moral and emotional, it seems to me that most of the key problems with war would have been solved a long time ago.

In the Middle East someone has to say "STOP!" and do so effectively - - and, at the levels of detail that matter, the people who have power don't know how to do so - (and have other failings, too.)

As with NUKES someone has to say "ENOUGH!" and so so effectively - - and, at the levels of detail that matter, the people who have power don't know how to do so - (and have other failings, too.)

It seems to me that there are issues of paradigm conflict here -- and it seems to me that some logically easy, but emotionally and organizationally wrenching things are going to have to come into focus and be recognized.

Historically, when paradigms are at the point of shifting -- there is a kind of intellectual dispair - and then things sort out. We're hearing plenty of dispairing language, from different sources. Maybe that's hopeful.

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