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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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rshow55 - 09:12am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4307 of 17697)
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'm very concerned, for all kinds of reasons, and was impressed with Frank Rich's Never Forget What? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/opinion/14RICH.html . . . a piece that I hope is widely read.

All the same, it seems to me that even Rich may be being unduly optimistic on a key issue. Rich dismisses the possibility that Iraq could be a quagmire, like Vietnam. I wouldn't be so quick to do that - the issue bears thinking about. The "bad guys" and the "good guys" were not simple, or simply motivated.

We need to remember some painful, awkward things about what Vietnam was like, and what American hopes and calculations and rationales were like. For all the horrors of that war, the still unfaced horrors of the Kennedy assassination, and all the carnage - it is also true that Lyndon Johnson, and many of the people around him, were in many ways very liberal and well-intentioned people. If it had been possible to convert enough Vietnamese for a political settlement that, in strategic terms, rejected Communism - many Americans would have tried, and tried hard - with resources as well as words, to make Vietnamese society prosperous and good in Vietnamese terms as we were then able to understand them. It didn't work.

But we shouldn't say "of course" it didn't work.

We didn't understand why that conversion couldn't be made to work then - and we don't understand now.

And the results of the Vietnamese war, for us, for Vietnam, and for the whole world have been in many ways far worse than "might have been" if we could have understood. Some responsible people knew they had a problem here - and I was asked to look at it - if I could figure something out.

Some things happening, it seems to me, are just as dangerous as they seem - and more dangerous than they seem on the surface.

When we try to impose our will on Saddam - on Iraq - however reasonable our reasons -- we ought to remember these ancient lines from Maurice. Not to say that they apply simply - but that the compexities connected to these words are vital matters of decency, life and death.

"This only makes a war lawful: that it is a struggle for law against force; for the life of the people as expressed in their laws, their language, and their government, against any effort to impose on them a law, a language, a government that is not theirs."

People in the Islamic countries want to accomodate modernity - in many ways - but they are conflicted and confused, so are we, and some things are going very wrong - many times surreally wrong. It is a time to be very careful.

4135 rshow55 9/2/02 7:23pm> . sets out Piaget's developmental stages

4136 rshow55 9/2/02 7:28pm contains a good poem, and asks "When information flows are degraded, and other patterns are manipulated, can we be reduced to thinking and acting like children? http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?224@@.ee74d94/5493

Have Karl Rove and his operatives evolved a system that reduces the American people to children with all the flaws Piaget describes?

We can't afford to make childish mistakes now. Nor can we forget that children can be very brutal.

With A Measured Pace on Iraq http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/opinion/14SAT2.html there is some time to sort some things out. The TIMES is surely right that "President Bush . . . has not shown that immediate action is warranted."

rshow55 - 09:19am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4308 of 17697)
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 wish people in power would talk to me, and I could have some resources to gather data - in a discussion about end games. Just a dream, I fear. But it seems to me that a lot of lives, many of them American, might be saved, and a lot of agony and terror prevented if that happened.

I've been "going through channels" (my promise to Bill Casey, in the case I've faced, was that I'd "come in through The New York Times " ) - - and working actively at the business, for years now. In many ways - and I don't think they've been accidental ways -- this thread has been a very long debriefing. As events have unfolded, I've debriefed more and more - - always asking, before I went deeper into things I wanted to communicate to the government - - whether there was another way -- whether the disclosure was done on terms that Casey would have approved of. I'm facing some more decisions of that kind now.

In some ways, it seems to me that the administration is trying hard, and doing some things very well. In some other key ways -- I'm concerned -- and not alone. Perhaps this "virtual debriefing" is the best that can be done.

If it is, it says some things about the inflexibilities of AMERICAN arrangements that bear remembering when we ask other nations to make accomodations that look not only reasonable, but simple, to us.

Maybe there are things they aren't doing because they simply can't.

If so, maybe we should look about for other ways of doing the necessary -- ways that can work.

lchic - 01:17pm Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4309 of 17697)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

USA Foreign Policy - Strategy 'Then' and 'Now'

http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Dominoes.htm

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