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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?

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lchic - 02:04pm Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4378 of 4383)

Empire: That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny.

And America shares Rome's conviction that it is on a mission sanctioned from on high. Augustus declared himself the son of a god, raising a statue to his adoptive father Julius Caesar on a podium alongside Mars and Venus. The US dollar bill bears the words "In God we trust" and US politicians always like to end their speeches with "God bless America."

Even that most modern American trait, its ethnic diversity, would make the Romans feel comfortable. Their society was remarkably diverse, taking in people from all over the world - and even promising new immigrants the chance to rise to the very top (so long as they were from the right families). While America is yet to have a non-white president, Rome boasted an emperor from north Africa, Septimius Severus. According to classicist Emma Dench, Rome had its own version of America's "hyphenated" identities. Like the Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans of today, Rome's citizens were allowed a "cognomen" - an extra name to convey their Greek-Roman or British-Roman heritage: Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course - starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Indeed, most would deny it. But that may come down to the US's founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they can't quite accept their current role as master.

One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from beginning to middle to end.

"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a nonterritorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders, what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman empire."

Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch. But it's just as possible that the US is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it? Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.

· Rome: The Model Empire, presented by Jonathan Freedland, is on Channel 4 on Saturday at 6.50pm

lchic - 02:10pm Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4379 of 4383)

"" As we shall see, increasingly throughout the twentieth century, the United States government denies the American people the democratic right to shape and control their government and society. Throughout the Cold War, the American government lied to the American people, spied on Americans who challenged government policy, and even killed Americans who challenged the government. Whether it was about Vietnam, the Soviet Union, El Salvador, Guatemala, or the Philippines, the United States government lied to the American people believing that we could not be trusted to make the right decisions to guarantee American political and economic dominance in the world. I believe that the growth of the American empire in the twentieth century, and the expansion of American economic and political domination over large parts of the world, threatened and weakened American democracy and American's faith in their government, their society, and their future. The irony of American imperialism is that we believed we were bringing our democracy and freedom to others, but in the end denied other countries and the American people the very freedoms we claimed America stood for. This is the tragic irony of what Williams calls "empire as a way of life."

American Empire (s) ****
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/spanish.htm

wrcooper - 02:22pm Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4380 of 4383)

bbuck:

Missile defense is a critical topic in US defense policy, because it has far-reaching implications for the strategic balance of power. Present and past administrations have portrayed it solely as defensive in nature, but that is a red herring. Any system that neutralized our enemies' offensive capabilities strengthens our own offensive capabilities. That equation is not lost on anybody except gullible US voters.

To handle so-called rogue nations or terrorist organizations that may acquire weapons of mass destruction, we would be better off spending our money on improved intelligence and interdiction forces. Then, when we obtained hard evidence for the existence of a credible threat, we could take conentional action to eliminate it.

Any smaller power that obtained a nuclear warhead, for instance, would be far more likely to smuggle it into the US (or to some other Western target) and detonate it on the ground. Developing a workable ICBM capability isn't easy, and it's not easy to hide. Launching a nuke at the US would be suicidal, and the Sadam Husseins of the world know it.

BMD is a bad idea, but it's a lucrative program for the contractors.

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