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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.

rshow55 - 05:30am Aug 1, 2003 EST (# 13199 of 13267)
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.

I don't want to hear almarst's "tune" all the time - but it makes a contribution. And under current circumstances, after the US has gone into a war for reasons that now turn out to have been either dishonest or dangerously incompetent - he deserves a careful hearing, I think.

He's seldom said anything as critical to the Bush administration as Tom Toles' cartoon in the Washington Post yesterday. Toles' cartoon implies, with some fairness - that the "sources" and "methods" the administration is using for decision making are totally bogus. Not a joke.

Weapons of mass destruction, and especially nuclear weapons, were at the center of the argument for war with Iraq as sold to the American people, to our allies, as expressed to the UN - and was the argument given to our troops who did the shooting, and were put in harms way.

Now, the key Bush response seems to be to change the subject - forcefully.

The Quagmire Debate By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 29, 2003; 9:03 AM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61072-2003Jul29.html

The Bush administration's supporters have finally come up with an explanation of why things appear to be going so badly in Iraq.

It's the media's fault.

The stakes in US decisions are, and have been, high - high enough that it is important that we be right. High enough that we need to do the best we can do. And with such large human consequences that Almarst and others can have some good reasons for indignation.

Were Sanctions Right By DAVID RIEFF http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/magazine/27SANCTIONS.html

They saved the world from Saddam Hussein. Or they killed 500,000 innocent children. Or they did both. A postwar inquiry.

Maybe the war in Iraq will turn out to be an improvement - for all the losses and costs. But the losses and costs are high - and loss of American credibility is a major one.

By fighting a war we did not need to fight - when there were better options - and on the basis of arguments that were astonishingly false, the US has weakened itself.

Now, we have to do the best we can. Lying may help in others' opinion - but my feeling is that the costs of deception and self deception are so high that "playing it straight" is by far our best hope.

rshow55 - 05:39am Aug 1, 2003 EST (# 13200 of 13267)
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.

Annan Warns of World 'Crisis' By FELICITY BARRINGER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/international/31NATI.html

" Secretary General Kofi Annan called publicly today for a rethinking of the international institutions that were largely sidelined during the Iraq war.

"Many of us sense that we are living through a crisis of the international system," he said. The war and more recent crises in Africa, he added, "force us to ask ourselves whether the institutions and methods we are accustomed to are really adequate to deal with all the stresses of the last couple of years."

Intrnational law is going to have to be renegotiated - we can't really afford to abandon it.

search "renegotiated", this thread.

And there have to be more effective constraints on the right to lie - including the right of leaders and nation states to lie.

rshow55 - 05:47am Aug 1, 2003 EST (# 13201 of 13267)
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.

Times are dangerous.

Grabbing the Nettle By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/01/opinion/01KRIS.html

"Time is slipping away for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula," warns a major report issued yesterday by the International Crisis Group. It adds: "North Korea has the materials and the capability to develop nuclear weapons — more than 200 of them by 2010."

What would it do with them? Well, it may have been bluster, but a senior North Korean official, Li Gun, warned a U.S. counterpart that if the stalemate continued, North Korea could transfer nukes abroad.

While President Bush has said he won't tolerate a nuclear North Korea, it looks as if that may be where we are headed. Part of the problem is that the administration is still groping for a policy on North Korea.

"We have an attitude, not a policy," said Donald Gregg, a former ambassador to South Korea who is president of the Korea Society in New York.

We're so used to the administration's hyping the Iraq threat that it's stunning to see officials playing down the North Korean crisis.

On this thread, I've said repeatedly that interdiction has to be an option. I think that's right - but I never imagined that it would be used as incompetently (dishonestly) as it has been.

I hope the negotiations with N. Korea can work. If they can't - we probably have to interdict - and we'll be doing it from a weaker position - under more muddled circumstances - than if we'd "played it straighter" in Iraq.

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