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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 - 07:22am May 5, 2002 EST (#2017 of 2043)

Press - Putin

Putin and his circle are convinced that reporting of military actions should be controlled, because they believe that the situation in Chechnya demands extremely harsh methods of waging war which are far removed from contemporary European standards.

lchic - 02:08pm May 5, 2002 EST (#2018 of 2043)

Would you like to study in America?

"Of course I would! Because if I go there, I can understand how that world really thinks. Because until now I only read about it in newspapers and only see it in TV."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/opinion/05FRIE.html

See her viewpoint on -
Presidency / Al Gore / Jewish

She's deluded : Why would she think that going to the USA would assit her in knowing
'how the world really thinks?'

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One thing that struck me looking at the Newpapers of countries such as Indonesia is .... they most often don't have a Foreign Page.

lchic - 02:17pm May 5, 2002 EST (#2019 of 2043)

"" Friedman a foot soldier for globalization
Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta

It is not important to agree or disagree with Thomas Friedman, but it is important to listen to him, simply because he seems to go out of his way to listen to others.

Ever since the Sept. 11 attack on America, the 48-year-old international affairs columnist for the New York Times is one of few Americans to continuously travel all over the Muslim world to find out why his country is so hated. Friedman, who was in Jakarta last week for the launch of the Indonesian translation of his best-seller The Lexus and the Olive Tree, keeps a diary and will soon publish another book of his travels.

He realizes that a cowboy comment like either the world is with America in its war against terrorism or is not has put all moderate Muslims in a quandary. The vast majority of Muslims dislike the Taliban but also disagree with the American government's view of the world that is suspected of being saturated by self-interest.

Even Friedman's tireless talk of peace and democracy makes many wonder if his vision is not limited to creating a social order around the world where free market capitalism is allowed to have a field day without thought of the fate of the farmer in the bowels of the countryside.

"The driving idea behind globalization is free market capitalism, the more you let market forces rule and the more you open the economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to every country in the world," Friedman writes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a work on how globalization has come to shape virtually everyone's domestic politics and international relations.

The book is as much a celebration of the end of the Cold War years and system as a guidebook to the new era of globalization.

Asked to pinpoint any negative aspects of globalization, he says that rapid economic development has to beware of devastating the environment. Individual identities are threatened and cultural homogenization happens.

The most important lesson that Friedman has learned after Sept. 11 is that new technologies have connected societies like never before but the lack of understanding between cultures is colossal.

"The closer we get the less we seem to understand each other," Friedman worries, comparing the world to a big family where everyone, including the crazy aunt, has the right to have her say. He constantly talks of building a future together instead of destroying it. The question is how can this be done without driving sections of the world population to desperation?

Friedman is all ears even when he is told that some of his theories especially on globalization are too naive. He waits for you to have your say but then counter questions whether you have an alternative.

And while you talk he notes it all down on his personal computer that is probably never unplugged. A cameraman accompanying Friedman is recording his odyssey for American viewers to eventually see what people around the world think of them and expect of them as the sole remaining Superpower.

Friedman regrets that people with differences seem to pierce the eardrums and refuse to listen to each other. The result is that wars continue endlessly and differences remain unresolved, he said at the Freedom Institute.

"It is still not clear to me what alternative the anti-globalization lobby has in mind. What is clear now is not whether we globalize but how we globalize."

The institute's director, Rizal Mallarangeng, later moderated a discussion between members of the Indonesian intelligentsia, like Goenawan Mohamad, and Friedman.

Friedman has said in the past that all the intellectual and creative energies in the Arab-Muslim world that are as bounti

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