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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (6808)	10/14/2001 12:25:14 PM
From: GROUND ZERO™	Respond to of 23908

Gee... what a comforting thought..... GZ

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (6808)	10/14/2001 8:36:06 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 23908

Hi Charleymane; I think both Fukuyama and Huntington were both wrong. Huntington's argument that compares the current situation to Rome's late period is wrong because he ignores the technological and manufacturing advantage that we have but Rome did not. Rome was hiring barbarians to defend themselves. When the U.S. wants to kick butt it sends in corn fed Iowa farm kids, not hired barbarian mercenaries. Part of the reason for the difference is how fighting is done. A thousand years ago close to half the people in the army would actually hold a weapon. Now the figure is more like what, 3%? This means that the fact that most of us are lazy couch potatoes doesn't mean jack. The roughest, toughest 3% of American society will kick the butts of any 3rd world conscript army on the planet. We've already seen them do it multiple times. (Falklands, Gulf War) And if they want to get nasty with bioweapons the same thing applies. All they can do is piss us off. If it comes down to survival, the U.S. could (and would) make bioweapons that would make the anthrax artillery shells put together by Iraq look no more dangerous than a pair of scissors. Yes the terrorists can kill thousands. Whoopee shit. Thousands of Americans have had jobs where they had to face the fact that they could be ordered to kill millions. We can kill billions, if we have to. Fukuyama, on the other hand, is wrong because his whole analysis assumes that the technologically, the world is in a "steady-state". That is, he makes the assumption that the world will always be advancing technologically at the fast pace it now does. Every physicist, mathematician or engineer knows that exponential growth is not a steady state situation for anything. Someday we will return to the slow growth in technology that characterized the late Roman period, and then, like Huntington says, the barbarians may be a problem. But that ain't gonna happen for at least the next 50 years, and maybe it won't happen for the next couple hundred years. We really don't know when technology will stop. -- Carl