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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 - 04:03am Feb 15, 2003 EST (# 8916 of 8918)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

peace because they will be hurt by violence. A Slobodan Milosevic may in the end succeed in breaking such integrated networks, but it is a lot easier to create violence if communities are segregated. The odds that normal politicians -- and Milosevic was not one -- can do so are low.

Could you persuade a segregated city to adopt these civic structures as a way of keeping the peace?

Yes, you could. I am engaged in a project to reconstruct Aligarh. We are trying to improve interaction between the Hindus and Muslims there. Cities can be turned around. Bhiwandi, a previously riot-prone town just outside Bombay, was turned around in the late 1980s, and it remained peaceful even during the awful Hindu-Muslim violence that took place in India in the early 1990s. Building integrated neighbourhood-level organisations was the key. You need the support of the government and the police, but essentially it is a job that civilians have to do. This would be harder after a civil war, when you need the state to come in in a big away.

Communal violence is often triggered by an apparently religious act - throwing a pig into a mosque, for example, or the killing of a cow. How much violence is genuinely religion-inspired?

The symbolism is often religious, but to call it religious violence is usually to oversimplify it. Religion can also be experienced as culture - I have a Hindu name but I am not a practising Hindu. The religious nature of communal problems is often exploited by people who are secular. It is better to use the term "ethnic". It's the same in Northern Ireland - not all Catholics and Protestants engaged in the struggle are really believers.

Is this kind of violence linked with poverty? Are richer places less prone to violence?

After a certain income threshold, the risk of riots does diminish. You'll still get community activists who want to fight for their cause, but this does not necessarily lead to violence. You could see this all over Europe as incomes rose after the Second World War. The recent riots I have studied in Indonesia, Nigeria and India look similar to the riots that took place in the US around the world wars: St Louis 1917 to 1918, Detroit 1938 to 1939, Harlem in the early 1940s. You don't get that kind of group rioting in the US today. But in affluent places you still get hate crimes. Income does not seem to affect these.

Why is group violence predominantly an urban phenomenon?

In a village, everyone knows everybody else. People have personal knowledge of each other, which reduces the likelihood of mass violence. But you do have violence of other kinds - for example, violence between castes.

Has the study of peace turned into a lifetime project for you?

Initially it was done out of intellectual curiosity that arose from my disenchantment with rationality. But it has acquired a life of its own and I'm very humbled and touched by all the attention that my book has received. If this research really helped to promote peace in the world it would be a life project worth doing.

Ashutosh Varshney's book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life is published by Yale University Press (2002)

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23821

lchic - 10:37am Feb 15, 2003 EST (# 8917 of 8918)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Iraq - strong moral case - Blair UK

Tony Blair ... insisted there was a strong "moral case" for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2765151.stm

"If we show weakness now, if we allow the plea for more time to become just an excuse for prevarication until the moment for action passes, then it will not only be Saddam who is repeating history.

"The menace, and not just from Saddam, will grow; the authority of the UN will be lost; and the conflict when it comes will be more bloody."

rshow55 - 10:52am Feb 15, 2003 EST (# 8918 of 8918)
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.

It seems to me that this is a very, very hopeful time - and it seems to me that the leaders of a lot of countries - including the United States - have a lot to be proud of - and a lot to hope for.

If nation states live up to the standards of discourse in How Four Countries Reacted, and What the Iraqis Said, Too http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/15/international/middleeast/15DTEX.html the world could become much better.

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23821 is superb.

We need to achieve - to negotiate into being - institutions that can meet human needs. That means institutions that actually have, and use, power when necessary. It seems to me that the chances for that are looking very good - if people stay honest - and that it is looking practical for the world to cut the incidence of agony and death from war way down from where it has been.

If we face human limitations a little more - lie a little less - and ask questions about proportion - a lot could get a lot better - and do so soon.

Times like this are, of course, very dangerous.

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