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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.

almarst2002 - 09:00am Sep 10, 2003 EST (# 13584 of 13598)

Bush's New War Lies - http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/091003a.html

... in today’s United States, there appears to be little shame in gullibility. Indeed, for some, it is a mark of patriotism. Others just act oblivious to their duties as citizens to be informed about even basic facts, even when the consequences are as severe as those of wartime.

This sad state of affairs was highlighted in a new Washington Post poll, which found that seven in 10 Americans still believe that Iraq’s ousted leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks although U.S. investigators have found no evidence of a connection.

As the Post notes, this widely held public misperception explains why many Americans continue to support the U.S. occupation of Iraq even as the other principal casus belli – trigger-ready weapons of mass destruction – has collapsed. [For more details on the poll, see the Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.]

Indeed, after listening to Bush on Sunday juxtapose references to the Sept. 11th murders, their al-Qaeda perpetrators and Iraq, it shouldn’t be surprising how seven out of 10 Americans got the wrong idea. It’s pretty clear that Bush intended them to get the wrong idea.

The reality is that Hussein and bin Laden were bitter rivals. Hussein ran a secular state that brutally suppressed the Islamic fundamentalism that drives al-Qaeda. Indeed, many of the atrocities committed by Hussein’s government were done to suppress Islamic fundamentalists, particularly from Iraq’s large Shia population. Bin Laden despised Hussein as an “infidel” who was repressing bin Laden's supporters and corrupting the Islamic world with Western ways.

Other inconvenient facts that Bush has left out of all his speeches about Iraq include that his father, George H.W. Bush, was one of the U.S. officials in the 1980s who was assisting and encouraging Hussein in his bloody war with Iran to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

The younger Bush also doesn’t mention that the CIA and its allies in Pakistani intelligence – not Iraqis – were involved in training al-Qaeda fundamentalists in the arts of explosives and other skills useful to terrorists. That was part of the U.S. covert operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Bush also trusts that the American people will have forgotten that other little embarrassment of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the elder Bush and President Reagan were involved in a secret policy of shipping missiles to Iran’s government. At the time, Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime was designated a terrorist state by the U.S. government.

Nor does the public hear much about how the U.S. government taught the dictators of Saudi Arabia techniques of suppressing political dissent to keep that oil-rich kingdom in pro-U.S. hands. Saudi leaders also financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East as part of the Saudi strategy for buying protection for their dictatorial powers. Out of this mix of repression and corruption emerged an embittered Osama bin Laden, a scion of a leading Saudi family who turned against his former patrons.

CONNECTING THE DOTS...

almarst2002 - 09:31am Sep 10, 2003 EST (# 13585 of 13598)

A reasonable question, but one that can only be properly answered in a broader context. The engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and (to a lesser extent) Palestine are all parts of a larger engagement that may last more like 40 years than four, and that any Democratic successor to Bush would find himself equally compelled to fight, even if not in exactly the same way. Is this engagement important?

Just think of it as World War IV.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/nj/rauch2003-09-09.htm

THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL SINCE KOSOVO. TOO BAD THE LITERACY RATE IN THIS "LEADER OF CIVILIZED WORLD" NATION DOES NOT RAISE ABOVE THE FLOOR.

almarst2002 - 10:15am Sep 10, 2003 EST (# 13586 of 13598)

the $87 billion request is nearly triple the amount the federal government plans to spend on elementary and secondary education this year, and more than twice as much as the budget for homeland security.

Weisman, using Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus as a source, also noted that the $166 billion that has been spent or requested exceeds "the inflation-adjusted costs of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf War combined" and "approaches the $191 billion inflation-adjusted cost of World War I."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50631-2003Sep9.html

EMPIRE BUILDING TODAY IS A MUCH COSTLIER PROPOSITION THEN EVER. AND EVEN THEN MAY NOT SURVIVE EVEN A SINGLE PRESIDENTIAL TERM IN OFFICE.

HAVE A NICE DREAMS.

almarst2002 - 02:07pm Sep 10, 2003 EST (# 13587 of 13598)

Mr Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, appeared to admit yesterday that the US government had failed to appreciate the scale of the reconstruction job in Iraq. She blamed a lack of information under the rule of Saddam Hussein, which meant any underestimate of the size of the task "was not at all surprising". - http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0910-02.htm

She forgot to mention that absence of WMD should also be attributed to the same "reason".

THAT'S SHOULD BE SAVED FOR GENERATIONS TO COME! FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. IT'S BEING TOO LONG OF A TIME SINCE DR. HEBBELS.

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