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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (5351)	8/1/2001 12:21:04 PM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 93284

Sorry I took this long to respond; been on the road...I go again tomorrow for two weeks. Hopefully, I can catch up with my backlog some. Easy to get high growth rates when you're coming from zero. During the '50s the USSR had a higher growth rate than the US. What they never had was the same per capita GDP. I wouldn't say exactly zero, but agreed they are starting from a low number. The difference between the Soviet Union in the 50's and today's China is that China is working their way, slowly, towards capitalism. Given the resources and population that they have to work with, I might speculate that China in 15-20 years might have a more than substantial GDP. But what of Guatemala? It's been at zero forever. There are numerous other countries that have been poor for decades and centuries. I might even think you're offering more examples of the point rather than being in disagreement. I wouldn't consider Guatamala to be societally stabe. I could perhaps think of some Island countries in the Pacific that seem to be societally stable in poverty, but that's an exception. It's fairly easy to come up with a list of countries in Africa or Central America that are nearly in a constant state of poverty and war....Somalia for example. Right, they can and will switch- -to a method that is more difficult, less reliable, less likely to work. That's part of the idea- -force them into more difficult paths. Except, I think we're forcing them to an easier, as reliable, less detectable and lower cost means of attack. From a nation state viewpoint, they move to cruise missiles rather than ICBMs and from the terrorist viewpoint they still stay with the Chevy Suburban approach. During the Cold War the US and USSR planned on annihilating each other if it came to it. I have the distinct impression that they didn't really care what their targets neighbors would think. The same logic will apply here. If Ghaddafi takes out an American city, Libya will be smoking ruins- -and we aren't going to ask its neighbors permission. If we fired on N. Korea, do you REALLY think the Chinese would launch at us? Nuts! They have some deaths and damage due to fallout; are they going to apply to convert that to annihilation? Not likely. That's an awfully big bet for "not likely". If that Chevy Suburban is SUCH a great delivery system, why did the US and USSR waste so much money on ICBMs? Chevy Suburbans are much cheaper. There a reason they built ICBMs: They will, with good reliability, put the warhead on the target anywhere that target happens to be. Including inside heavily guarded military facilities. Does your Suburban do that? Your mistake here is that your a trying to equate a low-reliability system to one of high reliability. It doesn't compute. Perhaps the difficulty with the dialogue here is that there are three different threats. Nation State [e.g., Russia or China], Rogue State and terrorist. Each one has a different objective and a different weapon[s] of choice. Chevy Suburbans are a poor choice for a nation state as they want to "win the big war" [given the illusion that anyone could actually "win" in global annihilation, but illusions are what they hold onto. If we weren't holding on to the illusion, everyone would be dropping their arsenals down to near zero]; Rogue States want to emulate the big guys, hence they want to have a ballistic missile capability so they can feel like they are one of the big boys, but they have no hope of winning the big war, they want effect. So they might as well just switch to the cruise missile, capture the feeling of being one of the big boys. The terrorist doesn't want to be one of the big boys, they want effect, the best effect is a suicide bomber [martyr for the cause]; it's a low budget operation, relatively. Ben Laden isn't going to develop an ICBM or cruise or any other sort of a sophisticated delivery system. Trucks and dingies are just fine by him. But each threat has a different objective and a different set of delivery systems that are appropriate for that objective. Regards, jttmab