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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mitch-c who wrote (51885)	9/11/2001 5:57:35 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 70976

Mitch, I just got back from the hospital and am feeling rather weak. So please bare with me if I am not very coherent. To my relief I found that my brother and my close friends who work in the financial district are fine. Sadly a few of my further friends and acquintances have been unreachable and I fear the worst for them. Like the rest of you I am feeling a myrid of emotions. And that is precisely what worries me. I worry that in the rush to please the public and make GW look like he can have a foreign policy, the populist road is taken and yet again much is left to be desired. We are dealing with a very complex issue here. There are huge human and "image" dimensions to it. But it is being treated like a military operation which it is not. There is call for revenge, which is the natural human emotion and I do agree with to some extent. But there is a lot of misguided and misdirected emotions and suggestions running around. "Solutions" that IMO not only do not solve the problem, they threaten the way of life and American values. And this is a bigger concern than any damage the bombs did. To be sure those involved should be brought to justice. Nothing would please me more than to see the Taliban kicked out of Afghanistan and their people freed of them. I would take great pleasure in seeing Sadam burn in hell on earth. And the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran do not deserve a better fate, though I seriously doubt they had anything to do with this. I could go on about PRC (which I am not a fan of) and so on. But there is another side to this equation. If I lived my life in such a way that actually drove someone to hate me so much that that he'd rather die than to see me alive, then it would be very ignorant and oblivious of me not to question my ways. I'd have to understand what the issues are before I can decide what the correct answer is. The people outside of the US do not really care what we do here with our lives and how we wish to live. But they have serious and some valid points about the way we carry our foreign policy. Yet foreign policy has never been an issue at election times. Rather it is only the local economy and taxes that have mattered. This in turn has created politicians who believe there is nothing wrong with selling out foreign countries to ruthless dictators who support our big business. What you are seeing is a graphic and tragic way of saying that "your foreign policy is destroying our lives and so we have to make it an internal affair to you since that is all you care about". Take a look at England or Israel or many other countries in the world who've had to deal with serious terrorist issues. In every case and after much bloodshed, the governments were forced to reconsider their policy and change their conduct. I am hopping that such prolonged and tragic course can be avoided here. I am by no means calling for negotiations with the terrorists. Rather I am calling for a change of policies that drive some people to join the terrorist organizations. That, IMO, will be the real and lasting solution. God bless you all, Sun Tzu PS Let us not forget that the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan under direct US support. Should we not carry some of the blame for all those Afghans who gravely suffered at the hands of the Taliban? How would you have felt about the Afghans, if they had placed a Taliban like regime in the US? PPS US was one of the biggest supporters of arms to Iraq which kept Sadam strong and in power.