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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 07:25am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2689 of 2693)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

War and Memory by TOBIAS WOLFF OpEd, today http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28WOLF.html seems so relavent here that I'm copying it in full, bolding a few passages for emphasis:

"STANFORD, Calif. -- Thirty-two years ago a team of American soldiers killed at least 13 innocent people in the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong. How did they come to do such a thing? The leader of that team, Bob Kerrey, says that it was a terrible accident, that they shot the civilians while returning enemy fire. Another soldier, Gerhard Klann, says that the unarmed women and children were rounded up and executed on Mr. Kerrey's orders. That is how each man claims to remember it.

"This contest of memory takes me back to when I was writing a memoir of my own service in Vietnam. I thought I knew how the book would go when I began it; I didn't. Again and again I found my old version of things overtaken by memories that made me wince in shame. Now and then I recalled good things I'd forgotten, notably the kindnesses of a sergeant who nursed me, a blundering young officer, through that dispiriting time. But the most forceful memories made me ashamed, and something more — they rendered me unrecognizable to myself. Maybe that's why I had forgotten them; they didn't fit my idea of myself.

" We tend to think of memory as a camera, or a tape recorder, where the past can be filed intact and called up at will. But memory is none of these things. Memory is a storyteller, and like all storytellers it imposes form on the raw mass of experience. It creates shape and meaning by emphasizing some things and leaving others out. It finds connections between events, suggests cause and effect, makes each of us the central figure in an epic journey toward darkness or light.

( Comment: this fits what we know of LSA and other things about "construction of reality" rshowalter 4/24/01 8:09pm )

"You would think, reading the accounts of that night in Thanh Phong, that either Mr. Kerrey or Mr. Klann must be lying. But my instinct is that each of them believes the story his memory has been telling him all these years. One of these stories may have been shaped by a man's sense of his innate decency, the other by a tendency toward self-condemnation. Witnesses to crimes and accidents are notoriously unreliable; imagine being young and terrified on a foggy night in enemy territory, everything going wrong, everything happening too fast. How could you see it clearly even at the time, let alone as the years and your own confusion of pride and remorse thicken the cloud over what you hate to think of anyway? Yet something happened that must be acknowledged. How shall we acknowledge the innocent people who died?

"Nations have memories, too. And those memories are almost unfailingly self-serving. If there is to be a correction in memory here, let it be our own. First, let's remember what it means to send people to war. War isn't a contest between champions. It isn't even a contest between armies. War is mostly violence — economic, emotional, physical — against civilians.

"We used to praise West Germany for confronting the past honestly and teaching its children the truth. East Germany and Japan did not, and for that we judged them harshly. Today, we urge Serbia to make a full accounting of its recent history. But what of our own? Where, in our national memory, do we account for our government's complicity in El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile?

rshowalter - 07:28am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2690 of 2693)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Wolff continued:

"It puzzles us that a good part of the rest of the world have come to see us as selfish bullies. It contradicts the idea we have of ourselves, and it makes us cross. Not as an exercise in self-loathing, but as a matter of the honesty we demand from others, we need to see our own past with some bravery. It won't be a complete disappointment — a lot of it is as good as we believe it is. But it will certainly chasten us, and perhaps make us less liable to adventures like the one that left those innocents dead in Thanh Phong, and turned what should have been the beautiful memories of fine young men into a tangle of competing nightmares."

rshowalter - 07:30am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2691 of 2693)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Confronting the past honestly, or making decisions that depend on knowledge of what actually happened, one must find a workable enough truth. rshowalter 3/19/01 11:08am

From S. J. Kline:

" We need to keep asking ourselves two questions: (i) What are the credible data from ALL sources? (ii) How can we formulate a model or solution that is consistent with all the credible data?

We must ask about consistency relationships. Not only constructions within minds, and among minds, though these are essential to understanding, and often right. We must also ask about consistency connected to physical facts that can be matched to. We must ask the question "what is consistent" or "most consistent" again and again.

When, for moral or practical reasons, the stakes are high enough, this hard, careful work is worth doing. With the internet, and new database and search tools now available, it is possilbe now to approximate "truth" on matters of fact better than we could before.

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