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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.

mazza9 - 04:41pm Dec 15, 2002 EST (# 6673 of 6680)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Manjumicha

During the Cold War the "Containment Policy" was based on the very simple. You moved into to a region to push against the Soviet shove. The revolutionary Iranian movement of the clerics, (see Tom Friedman's essary in todays NYTimes Editorial page), was a Soviet shove that needed to be contained.

We had to choose between the clerics who violated international law with the taking of diplomatic hostage and the dictatorship that could contain their brand of idiocy, (kinda like yours!)

It's sorry that you are soo ignorant when it comes to history but heck, there's no minimum requirements to posting your kind of filth at the NYTimes "moderate" forums.

Bono serra, mon ami!

manjumicha - 04:47pm Dec 15, 2002 EST (# 6674 of 6680)

Gee, you speak in such a complicated manner...so what is your answer? Did Sadamm's WMD come from US or not? So your morality is as long as Sadamm was torturing and gasing iranians and kurdish children, you considered him worthy of receiving anthrax from US?

manjumicha - 04:59pm Dec 15, 2002 EST (# 6675 of 6680)

And that makes you a geo-political thinker...:-)

This forum gets better and better

gisterme - 05:33pm Dec 15, 2002 EST (# 6676 of 6680)

lunarchick 12/15/02 8:19am

"...Bush now has all three members of his “axis of evil” openly defying attempts by America to limit the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction..."

One doesn't have to read between the lines too much to interpret that as: "...now has all three members of the "axis of evil" openly denying the folly of posessing WMD.".

Sounds like the world is getting very small for some.

I have a friend who is an Iranian citizen and an engineer working here in the States. He and I usually don't discuss the world situation much but on this one occasion we began to discuss the prospects of a potential forced end to Saddam's regime. He said that as an Iranian he wouldn't mind seeing an end to Saddam since Saddam had caused great misery in Iran by making war on it. I asked him why Iran is trying to obtain WMD. He said he believes Iran needs them to protect itself from regional neighbors who also have them, specifically Iraq and Israel. He cited Israel's destruction of the Iraqi nuclear power plant as an example for the need.

I belive my friend very honestly exprssed his perception of the situation. That was the end of that discussion.

An Iraq with Saddam Hussein at the helm would be frightening to have as a neighbor. The reasons for that are obvious. However, I had to wonder why my friend was so worried about Israel. Didn't the destruction of Saddam's source of weapons-grade materials help Iran as much as it did Israel? I think so. To my knowledge, the government of Israel has never expressed any desire for possession of territory beyond that that was their traditional homeland since biblical times. Israel even offered to give up much of that traditional homeland in exchange for peace just a couple of years ago. I don't believe that it was a decision by the ordenary Palestinean on the street that rejected that offer for peace. I belileve that it was the decision of the jihadist ladership far beyond the borders of Israel/Palestine that was behind that rejection of peace.

Israel, even including all of its traditional territories, can only amount to a fraction of a percent of the world's total real estate. In my view, the only reason that that wee bit of territory remains such a bone of contention is that jihadists want it to remain so. It's the lie that they're using disguise and empower their larger agendas. I have to say it seems likely to me that Israel will also be the bone that jihadists finally choke on.

I notice that Arafat seems to have suddenly come to the realizaton that his own little empire is nearly over and that he no longer has any control over the situation in Israel/Palestine. It's kind of pitiful to watch. It brings to mind something Winston Churchill once said WRT another dictator (I paraphrase):

"He's riding the tiger and the tiger is getting hungry".

Arafat is about to be devoured by the same beast that he worked so hard to help create.

Yet my friend's honest expression shows that the jihadist PR campaign has had some success. Could it be true that Israel has some intention of invading or otherwise doing unprovoked harm to Persia or to the Arab nations? That question, when processed through the filter of common sense, only has one answer. The answer is "of course not!".

The political nation of Israel has no power to expand beyond its biblical territories yet it is indestrucible within them. What evidence could I present to back up that statement? I would offer historical hindsight.

Does anything happen in the world that God doesn't know about? Any faithful Muslim, Christian or Jew will answer that question in exactly the same way.

The tiger is getting hungry but it seems likely that Arafat will only be the appetizer.

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