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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 - 11:41pm Apr 8, 2002 EST (#1209 of 1228)

GU talk thread - re rest of the world ... http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@@.eea3993/14 .. don't hold your breath!

_{.. the first Palestinian-Israeli war. It is, in important respects, an asymmetrical war. Israel is a state and Palestine is a proto-state; Israel has a powerful military machine and Palestine has a powerful terror machine. But on the battlefield of legitimacy, of the right to statehood in this particular place, the Israelis and the Palestinians are evenly matched; and the relative military weakness of the Palestinians has not prevented them from sending an unprecedented shudder through Israeli society, and from committing unspeakable crimes. The Palestinians also possess a variety of military organizations: The savage campaign of Palestinian terror is only a part of the armed resistance to the Israeli occupation that is the real innovation of these terrible days. For the first time since the creation of Israel, the Palestinians are fighting for a Palestine in Palestine. They have understood what Israel grasped a long time ago: that all the Arab-Israeli wars were fought by the Arab states not for Palestine but against Israel. http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020415&s=wieseltier041502}

rshow55 - 11:41pm Apr 8, 2002 EST (#1210 of 1228)

Guilty Plea Seen in the Shredding of Enron Records By KURT EICHENWALD http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/business/09ENRO.html

"David B. Duncan, the Arthur Andersen accountant, will plead guilty to obstruction of justice for shredding Enron-related documents and serve as a government witness."

Sometimes, in ways large and small, the "system" works. Problems that now endanger the world could be solved -- may be partly on the way to being solved. - - - step by step.

MD915 rshow55 3/28/02 4:29pm :

I don't think an American presidential administration in this century has ever achieved such low credibility as the current one. People, some inside the US, and many more outside, are getting more willing to ask for facts - - even when the issue of deception on the part of the United States has to be explicitly considered.

Here's a quote from a mystery story writer, Dashiell Hammet in The Thin Man , 1933. Hammet's speaking of a sexy, interesting, treacherous character named "Mimi". He's asked by a police detective what to make of what she says:

" The chief thing," I advised him, "is not to let her wear you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place, and when you catch he in that one, admits it, and gives you still another, and so on. Most people . . . get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying, and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her. "

The United States, in its diplomatic and military fuctions, can be too much like that.

If world leaders want some things clarified, questions of US veracity are going to have to be adressed. If leaders want these matters clarified, these issues can be -- and I believe that it would be greatly to the benefit of the United States to have them clarified.

The "missile defense" boondoggle is a fine place to start, because so many of the technical issues are so clear.

Gretchen Morgenson should be particularly proud. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/nyregion/08beat_reporting.1.html

So should the New York Times.

rshow55 - 11:51pm Apr 8, 2002 EST (#1211 of 1228)

MD941-42 rshow55 3/29/02 4:14pm includes this:

Almarst , as you know, I've been very concerned with a "vast right wing conspiracy" -- dating from Eisenhower's time at the latest, and going far beyond Scaife. I was glad to see The Smoke Machine by PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/29/opinion/29KRUG.html which carries an important message: "that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby." Krugman writes in the NYT, a careful newspaper, with many working alliances with the "American ruling classes" - and a paper which is reasonably careful not to "bite the hand that reads it"

Injustices that seem entrenched and unchangeable sometimes change very completely -- for a corpus showing such a process as it has unfolded see the articles collected in Understanding Enron http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/1/Transcripts/721/4/business/_ENRON-PRIMER.html

Almarst , it seems to me that there are more people in the world working to get some of our concerns adressed than there have ever been before, and that sometimes reasonable compromises get fashioned, even between very imperfect people and groups.

. . . .

really out.

qwerty8989 - 02:19am Apr 9, 2002 EST (#1212 of 1228)

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