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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dealer who wrote (41784)	9/16/2001 10:51:51 AM
From: Jill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Some excerpts from THE NATION--a leftist rag, for sure, but some very good editorial pieces in it. Just a few points: "Many reports reminded the public that the world was awash in nuclear materials and the wherewithal for other weapons of mass destruction. Russia is bursting at the seams with these materials...We must keep room in our mins for the fact that it could have been worse. To lose two huge buildings and the people in them is onte thing; to lose all of Manhattan--or much much more--is another. The emptiness in the sky can spread. We have been warned." "Kenneth Kazman, as terrorism expert in the Congresssional Researches Service, said, "How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me--way bey9nd me. There's a major, major intelligence failure, specially since the previous Trade Center bombing produced such an investigation of the networks and so much monitoring." But the operating assumptions at work deserve close assessment. Human intelligence against closed societies and secret outfits has long been a difficult, almost impossible, endeavor. Hurling money at it is lkely no solution. During the Vietnam War, when resources were unlimited, the CIA failed spectacularly at humint {human intelligence, rather than techincal intelligence like spy satellites}, essentially never penetrating the inner sanctums of the enemy." "I have sat in front of bin Laden ashe described how his men helped to destroy the Russian Army in Afghanastian and thus the Soviet Union. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing nto Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia--paid and uinformed by America's Israeli ally--hackin nad rpaing and murdering their way through refugee camps. As an Arab how he responds to the thousnads of innocent deaths in America and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unpseakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraw, why we did not rage about the 17,5000 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Eight years ago, I helped to make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Now I remember some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learned what this means." There's more interesting stuff but I'm getting tired of typing! <g> I think its very important in these days, as intelligent Americans, to understand the forces that led to us, the complexity of forces at work. It is NEVER as simple as good and evil, black and white, freedom and tyranny. Certainly our leaders understand this--an interview yesterday about Pakistan for instance--we ourselves have to walk a delicate line and not push them too far. If we ask TOO much of them, their own Islamic fundamentalists will rebel and try to attempt a state coup and take over the country. It is all very complex for each nation involved. And that is not to say that ultimately, since now there is no turning back, I don't back my government and Bush. I do. I have to.