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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?

leungki - 11:11am May 4, 2001 EST (#3216 of 3222)

Is Iraq really a rogue nation ? It spent ten years fighting Iran, at which time the US considered it a strategic partner and friend backed up by several billion dollars worth of military hardware.

Then came Kuwait. Unlucky for Iraq to have raised that issue during Bush Sr.'s tenure. Bush Sr founded a company called "Zapata Offshore" which later merged with Pennzoil Corp. a large petrol exploration and exploitation company. Pennzoil made a killing developing middle-eastern oilfields in which it still has considerable interests. The Bush family has of course a significant amount of money tied up in Pennzoil. Interestingly enough Pennzoil/Zapata made a significant amount of cash from the development and part ownership of oilfields in the Sheikdom of Kuwait !

Therefore, the gulf war against arch-rogue state Iraq was in fact Bush Sr sending American girls and boys in uniform to die for the Bush family commodities portfolio. Charming no ?

rshowalter - 12:11pm May 4, 2001 EST (#3217 of 3222)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I myself am very concerned that issues of fraud, and really gross conflict of interest, may explain a great deal --- and that many values may have been betrayed for the very worst of reasons.

Concerned doesn't mean convinced. But as pieces that fit into this sort of "puzzle" accumulate -- it becomes more credible.

It does seem surprising, and sad, that the situation in Iraq after the Gulf war has gone so badly (and that the Gulf war finished so badly -- a clean military victory was thrown away -- leaving a festering mess ). But perhaps there is another explanation.

Perhaps, also, there is nothing much to do about it, or nothing anybody will want to do about it, if the story "ends redemptively." I'm giving thought now to the movie Casablanca , and just now, to how it ends. It is, for many people, a warming end, but from other perspectives, a chilling one.

The French prefect of Police for Casablanca, Captain Renault, is a charming man, in many ways. But Renault is also convincingly portrayed as an accomplice in murder, a perpetrator of enormous and routine injustices to innocent and weak people, a corrupter who forces sexual favors from desperate women -- and, again and again, corrupt.

In the closing scene, Renault converts to the resistance --- and off Rick and Renault go, arm in arm, walking toward a fight with a common enemy. And all is forgiven. And the usual person watching the movie feels good about it.

Maybe, even if the Bush family is as deeply compromised as it sometimes seems, others may react the same way.

Maybe there's no guilt at all, but only a mass of contradiction.

But these people, and the nation they lead, bear checking -- as all people and all nations really do.

If the Bush administration does nothing else - it may succeed in completely purging any association between the United States and good morals from the minds of most outside the USA. That might be a great thing for the whole world, and perhaps for America, too.

rshowalter - 12:18pm May 4, 2001 EST (#3218 of 3222)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163 Entries 1-35 tell a key story about the nuclear terror, keyed in detail to the movie Casaablanca. From #153 there are extensive summaries, with many links, of this thread as it has been written from Sept 25 on. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/158

rshowalter - 12:26pm May 4, 2001 EST (#3219 of 3222)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In this thread and elsewhere, Dawn Riley and I have worked to focus patterns of human reasoning and persuasion, and problems with human reasoning and persuasion. ...md 2565-68 :
rshowalter 4/24/01 7:56pm
rshowalter 4/24/01 8:09pm
rshowalter 4/24/01 8:10pm

We believe that problems that were intractable before may be tractable now, with the discipline of some of the new insights combined with the extended memory and complexity handling resources of the internet.

Nuclear destruction may be such a problem.

The world doesn't have to be ideal, or totally pacific, for people to find enough skill and grace to keep nuclear weapons from going off.

rshowalter - 12:41pm May 4, 2001 EST (#3220 of 3222)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Perhaps people, even with all their flaws, might even find the skill, discipline and grace needed to outlaw nuclear weapons, in a way that really works.

At least, numbers might be reduced, and controls improved, so that the world survives.

It would be sad to have all the hopes of the world stupidly ended, with the history of higher life on earth ending with a mass of rotting unburied corpses.

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