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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 - 01:40am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4359 of 4365)

Said | Lewis
(Academic Conflict here not cooperation!)

Works by Edward Said, 1987 http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/said/1987.html

"" ..... "The Roots of Muslim Rage" Its author, Bernard Lewis, made his name forty years ago as an expert on modern Turkey, but came to the United States in the mid-seventies and was quickly drafted into service as a Cold Warrior, applying his traditional Orientalist training to larger and larger questions, which had as their immediate aim an ideological portrait of "Islam" and the Arabs that suited dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy ...
From his perch at Princeton (he is now retired and in his late eighties but still tirelessly pounds out polemical tracts), he seems unaffected by new ideas or insights, even though among most Middle East experts his work has been both bypassed and discredited by the many recent advances in knowledge about particular forms of Islamic experience. ...

With his veneer of English sophistication and perfect readiness never to doubt what he is saying, Lewis has been an appropriate participant in post-September discussion, rehashing his crude simplifications in The New Yorker and the National Review, as well as on the Charlie Rose show. ...
Announcing portentously that Muslims have "for a long time" been asking "what went wrong?" he then proceeds to tell us what they say and mean, rarely citing a single name, episode, or period except in the most general way. One would never allow an undergraduate to write so casually as he does that, during the nineteenth century, Muslims were "concerned" about the art of warfare, or that in the twentieth "it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong." How he impresses nonexpert Americans with generalities that would never pass in any other field or for any other religion, country, or people is a sign of how degraded general knowledge is about the worlds of Islam, and how unscrupulously Lewis trades on that ignorance—feeds it, in fact. ...

Karen Armstrong is the other best-selling author tossed up by the mass anxiety so well traded on by the media in recent months. Like Lewis, she wrote her book long before the September events, but her publishers have pushed it forward as an answer to the problem of our times. I wish I could say more enthusiastically that in its modest way it is a useful book, but, alas ...

To understand anything about human history, it is necessary to see it from the point of view of those who made it, not to treat it as a packaged commodity or as an instrument of aggression.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/crisis/said.htm

lchic - 01:48am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4360 of 4365)

Bernard Lewis || "" “The Patriarch of the Islamicists”, as he is called in the American press, stands out as a partisan of classic liberal values. He is often attacked because he refuses to comply with the spirit of the times, in which the voice of relativism is strong, which is cautious about judging cultures from the point of view of western culture. In his best known debate, he faced Edward Said, the well-known Palestinian professor of literature, in whose book “Orientalism” he condemns Lewis and scholars like him. He charges that their studies are another means which the West uses to strengthen its imperialistic rule. http://www.jewsweek.com/israel/092.htm

lchic - 02:10am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4361 of 4365)

What went wrong / Lewis http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm

Do Lewis and Said mirror the Palestinian/Isreali conflict?

lchic - 06:11am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4362 of 4365)

Islam - see Danny Postel - Islam's dissident diaspora
http://chronicle.com/ The Chronical of Higher Education
also note
NUCLEAR-SECURITY GRANTS 18Sept2002
<subscribe> The National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, announced last week that it had awarded almost $27.5-million in grants to 22 universities and 1 research company to support research related to managing the nuclear-weapons stockpile.

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