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

To: Jerome who wrote (52420)	9/18/2001 10:50:22 AM
From: James Calladine	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 70976

REPEATED FROM ANOTHER THREAD: Good post! And Greg, and others, please do not interpret as what I am going to say as: -- sanctioning the horror of last week -- support of terrorists -- support of Bin Laden The recorded FACT is that for many years the US has had a very PRAGMATIC foreign policy which could be summed up as "looking after our interests". In the case of many of the poorest countries of the world this "interest" has been commercial (United Fruit in Central America) or strategic (Oil in the Middle East). This pragmatic approach has led to supporting whatever local "strong-man" is in charge at the time (providing that "strong-man" can be brought round, by whatever means to supporting US interests. Sometimes the means have been money, sometimes arms, sometimes other "considerations". That has led to backing(in one way or another) such "horses" as: -- Marcos in the Philippines -- Noriega in Panama -- Bin Laden in Afghanistan -- Contra rebels in Central America -- The Shah of Iran -- Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- The "Royal Family" in Saudi Arabia -- the profoundly corrupt regime in Malaysia Such people are happy enough to accept assistance which will bring them into power or keep them in power. But very often they have little or no interest in the poor and disenfranchised of their country and any local opposition to them has to go underground. Terrorist activities arise as a form of opposition and the terrorist groups vilify the US because of its support of what IS a dictatorial, corrupt and absolutely non-democratic regime. That has become the position of the US, over and over again. From the point of view of the local opposition it is just another form of "imperialism" such as earlier practiced by: -- the British -- the Dutch -- the French -- the Portugese -- the Spanish -- the Romans -- Genghis Khan The US is NOT alone in this. Virtually all of the European major powers have, for example, done virtually the same thing in Africa. And the British are just as skilled at the game as the Americans, except that they do not have the same clout, so the British and the Americans tend to work together. The World Bank, to a significan degree has been a major support to such activities. At root, some of the issues are: -- do we have any real interest in the welfare of the local people? -- do we have any real interest in human rights? -- how do we balance commercial and strategic interests against that? It will NOT be done by each "rich" power acting unilaterally relative to its interest alone. It might be done by: -- COOPERATION of the major AND minor powers -- TOLERANCE of differences of culture, religion, world views etc. Believe it or not, not everybody wants to be exactly like Americans, Canadians, Europeans! The greatest hope in the present situation is some sort of progress towards this. The "eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, "vengeance is mine", "nuke-em" point of view has been extensively tested and has been found (to be gentle) wanting. If it would work in this present situation, and end terrorism of the kind we experienced last week, I would be in favor of it. But it won't. Namaste! Jim