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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 - 12:28pm Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6283 of 6290)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Daring to Shoulder Historical Responsibility: Way to Become Big Political Power http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200104/18/eng20010418_67992.html

China expresses good and important ideals. But China sometimes acts in ugly ways, and violates the good advice in that article horribly, for example in the situation set out in WHEN LIES KILL: In China, the Right to Truth Meets Life and Death by ERIK ECKHOLM http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/weekinreview/17ECKH.html

" An AIDS epidemic in a rural Chinese province is only the latest example of the heavy costs of the controls on information and political choice."

MD5523 rshowalter 6/20/01 11:02am

Those violations don't invalidate the high ideals that the Chinese government sometimes expresses. But it is unfortunate that sometimes, though by no means always, China soils those ideals, and does so knowing, at many levels, that she can do better.

gisterme - 12:46pm Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6284 of 6290)

midmoon 6/28/01 10:40pm

midmoon wrote: "...Anyway, Russia has become one of the victorious nations after the WWII, albeit it never did anything other than to keep its land.

In this sense, the Russia was mere a free rider..."

Midmoon, I agree with a lot of the general things you say about communism in your post but can't agree with your specific statement about the USSR being a "free rider" in WW II. 20+ million dead is hardly a free ride. It's true that they "gobbled up" eastern Europe; but they did that while driving toward the nazi capital. The real Cold War trouble didn't start until Stalin began installing puppet dictatorships, backed by the Red Army, in those "liberated" countries.

rshowalter - 01:00pm Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6285 of 6290)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And the Cold War, so ugly in so many ways -- hasn't ended yet -- but we're moving in that direction.

In some ways, it is more difficult than it looks, because so much goes so far back -- so that there's a lot to change -- and things have to happen step by step -- and nothing like "perfect justice" is even thinkable -- much less obtainable.

To sort things out -- what was done has to be common ground - - the situation is so complicated that there simply is no other way.

And people can only do things that they can do -- as they are, step by step.

I think some OpEd pieces today help to illuminate some of the problems -- which go back a long way.

rshowalter - 01:08pm Jun 29, 2001 EST (#6286 of 6290)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Two OpEd pieces today make sober but important reading, when one considers the concerns almarst has expressed here -- the need, from Russia's point of view, to see that the US does not act, in the future, as it has in the past. Reading them, one should consider that the soldiers and officials involved saw the Vietnam War as part of a larger conflict, where they were threatening much worse things - unimaginably worse things with nuclear weapons -- so that conventional wars, such as Vietnam, were thought of "from a larger perspective" as a "lesser evil".

These pieces, I believe, are closely connected to Russia's need for assurances that it will not be victimized, nor countries it cares about be victimized, by a nation, the United States, which, for half a century stood willing to do anything to anyone it could, by an accident of position or birth, or belief, call "Communist."

Lying About Vietnam by DANIEL ELLSBERG http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/29/opinion/29ELLS.html

Misreading the Pentagon Papers by LESLIE H. GELB http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/29/opinion/29GELB.html

Yesterdays OpEd ad by ExxonMobil connects to the misrepresentations described and partly defended above, misrepresentations involved with missile defense and related issues, and problems of corruption that apply to the entire military-industrial complex now, forty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his FAREWELL ADRESS http://www.geocities.com/~newgeneration/ikefw.htm

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