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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.

almarst2003 - 10:03pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13631 of 13638)

Many writers and reporters have traced al-Qa’eda and other terror groups’ origins back to the Afghan war of 1979–1992, that last gasp of the Cold War when US-backed mujahedin forces fought against the invading Soviet army. It is well documented that America played a major role in creating and sustaining the mujahedin, which included Osama bin Laden’s Office of Services set up to recruit volunteers from overseas. Between 1985 and 1992, US officials estimate that 12,500 foreign fighters were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and guerrilla warfare tactics in Afghan camps that the CIA helped to set up.

Yet America’s role in backing the mujahedin a second time in the early and mid-1990s is seldom mentioned — largely because very few people know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it never happened. Following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of their puppet regime in 1992, the Afghan mujahedin became less important to the United States; many Arabs, in the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause’. It was not long before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs.

The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it.

http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec19.html

almarst2003 - 10:09pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13632 of 13638)

HOUSTON (Reuters) - President Bush called on the international community on Friday to join the effort to build a stable postwar Iraq and said free nations could not be neutral in the "fight between civilization and chaos." http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3437434

GUESS WHO IS RESPONCIBLE FOR CHAOS?

almarst2003 - 10:16pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13633 of 13638)

The Nixon-Kissinger policies in Southeast Asia also included illegal and deadly bombing of Cambodia, where the Pentagon flew 3,630 raids over a period of 14 months in 1969 and 1970. (Cambodia’s neutrality in the Cold War and the Vietnam War had infuriated Washington.) Military records were falsified to hide the bombing from Congress. Massive carnage among civilians also resulted from U.S. air strikes on Laos. - http://www.fair.org/media-beat/030911.html

almarst2003 - 10:22pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13634 of 13638)

Even those who welcomed the fall of the Iraqi dictator lost any sympathy for the US troops after they opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protesters in Falluja in May, killing 18 people and leaving at least 70 injured.

By late yesterday no US officer had appeared at the main police station in Falluja to apologise or explain what had happened. Lieutenant Ayad Dulaimi, 25, said policing in Falluja had become increasingly difficult because people associated the police with the US military. "We are filled with grief for our dead colleagues," he said. "The fact there has been no apology only adds fuel to the fire."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1041212,00.html

almarst2003 - 10:38pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13635 of 13638)

In claiming that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, Bush is heralding a self-fulfilling prophecy: He claimed Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism, and he turned it into one. - http://www.salon.com/opinion/scheer/2003/09/10/bush_speech/index.html

almarst2003 - 10:40pm Sep 12, 2003 EST (# 13636 of 13638)

The war on Saddam has made the U.S. less secure, say foreign-policy experts. - http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/31/security/index.html

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