Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (42804)	9/9/2002 9:22:16 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

It remains to be seen whether we'll be better because of 9/11 By HUBERT G. LOCKE SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER Sunday, September 8, 2002 In the 200-plus years of our nation's history, there have been three occasions when an event occurred that reshaped or radically altered our view of ourselves as Americans and of our place in the world. Each occasion has been a defining moment for this country, one in which we experienced a certain loss of national innocence -- a shattering of some pervasive myth about who we are and what we imagine our national destiny to be. On the first two occasions -- because we were forced to shed some illusions about ourselves -- we emerged a stronger, better nation. In the third case, it remains to be seen whether we will be either better or stronger -- the jury is still out. All three occasions witnessed a violent attack on the United States. Americans would like to believe episodes of massive violence can plague other bellicose parts of the planet but are events to which we are -- or ought to be -- geographically immune. Two oceans and an almost endless land border with friendly neighbors had given us a false sense of security that all three events shattered decisively. Each occasion -- each a physical assault on our country -- led to war. On the first occasion, in the spring of 1861, a group of secessionist firebrands attacked Fort Sumter, S.C. It was the opening shot in the Civil War -- a conflict in which the very idea of the United States -- the "one nation indivisible" that we imagined ourselves to be -- was shattered by the discovery that our foes were our fellow Americans. At Fort Sumter, we met the enemy and in the immortal words of Pogo, he turned out to be us. The second occasion -- the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- was a blow to our national assumption that we could exist as a nation apart and aloof from the rest of the world and its turmoil. It was almost the midpoint of the last century before we came to see that we are not a fortress of wealth and prosperity in the world that can ignore the conditions of life for people elsewhere. The world's woes-- its seemingly endless conflicts and crimes against the highest human ideals -- present challenges and issues we cannot avoid. We've had exactly a year to think about the third defining moment in our history -- what everyone is content to refer to simply as "9/11." It has shattered our national sense of invincibility and has left us feeling uncertain about our future. It has also plunged us into a war quite unlike anything we have previously experienced -- a war in which we face no opposing army but dread another attack, and one in which we've ostensibly vanquished our immediate foes but a war that we are told will last indefinitely. War has a strange effect on people. It can engender a sense of patriotism and willingness on the part of citizens to make great personal sacrifices in order regain the peace and restore the nation's security. But it can unleash a mood of vengefulness and hostility quite out of keeping with a country's normal character. Every war has its enemy -- and once identified and depicted -- anyone or anything resembling or reminiscent of that enemy can become subject to deep suspicion, if not outright scorn. "During the Civil War," writes the noted southern historian Clement Eaton, "Northern travelers, schoolteachers, peddlers and workmen in the South were in constant danger of being brought before vigilance committees, flogged and expelled . . . on the basis of unfounded suspicions. . . . Such a flagrant violation of civil liberties was sanctioned by the legal authorities and by popular opinion in general." After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, suspicion and scorn combined to facilitate rounding up and shipping off thousands of Americans of Japanese descent to desert prisons euphemistically termed internment camps. Today, billboards and lapel pins proclaim "united we stand" but they belie a nation that is far from one mind about our response to the tragedy of 9/11. Some are tempted to subject people from the Middle East to the same scorn and suspicion that Northerners endured 140 years ago and Japanese Americans faced 60 years ago. Others are scornful of those who express the slightest misgivings about the nation's war on terrorism or its proposed war on Iraq. Still others are dismayed by the flagwaving and war drumbeating and suggest this is an opportune -- indeed, long overdue -- moment in our history to stop and consider why our nation, its policies and its way of life are the source of so much anger in other parts of the world. Two sentiments have seemed to surface and to compete with each other whenever we have been at war in America. One is that expressed by Stephen Douglas, who won the Senate race in Illinois against Abraham Lincoln in 1858 but lost the race for the presidency to Lincoln in 1860. As the Civil War broke out, he stoutly declared, "There can be no neutrals in this war -- only patriots -- or traitors." Alternatively, shortly after the end of World War II, George Kennan, U.S. ambassador to Russia and one of the keenest of the Cold War strategists, warned that "something may occur in our own minds and souls which will make us no longer like the persons by whose efforts this republic was founded and held together, but rather like representatives of that very power we are trying to combat: intolerant, secretive, suspicious, cruel, and terrified of internal dissension because we have lost our own belief in ourselves and in the power of our ideals." It remains to be seen which of these sentiments we will honor -- on these two alternatives, the jury is also still out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hubert G. Locke of Seattle is a retired professor and former dean of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. seattlepi.nwsource.com

To: JohnM who wrote (42804)	9/9/2002 9:42:07 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

No, the difference isn't between "induce" and "lure." As the story is told (and since Bill doubts it I am reluctant to give it credence until further research) Brzezinski told Carter that the aid would induce a Soviet military invasion AFTER the intention to give the aid was formulated. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. Do you see it? Brzezinski is careful to NOT say what FL says he said. As the sentence is structured, Brzezinski might very well have been warning Carter of potential dire consequences. As well he might. Millions of Afghanis certainly believe the consequences of that invasion were dire, and I concur. What happened to them is rotten enough if one believes it was inevitable. To believe that it was preventable is horrifying. I hope Bill is right and it's a fake.

To: JohnM who wrote (42804)	9/9/2002 9:55:13 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Enemies Without and Enemies Within Terrorism is evil. And so is big-business thievery. By DIANE McWHORTER LA TIMES COMMENTARY September 9, 2002 Among my compatriots in New York, the anniversary of Sept. 11 is being faced with a dread unrelated to anxieties about homeland security. No, we do not feel at all safe. Yet almost as troubling as the fear that things will never be "normal" again is a sense that things have gotten too normal too soon. Couples who brunch have reclaimed the abandoned apartments around ground zero. Firefighters get around unmolested by huggers and amateur paparazzi. New Yorkers in general have recovered from the tenderness that marked our casual interactions throughout last fall, and the families of the victims are fighting over their payouts. If there is a reluctance to look back on the last year, it may be not because of what we will see but because of what we won't see. What is missing is spiritual resonance, evidence that something constructive came out of the slaughter. Why did a trauma experienced so deeply and endured so magnificently inspire no commensurate civic vigor? The emptiness we feel a year later is the absence of redemption, of proof that we have been transformed by the pain. A valuable key to how national identity is shaped by epic disaster lies at the bottom of the ocean, in a wreck that also had been the technological marvel of its day. The collapse of the World Trade Center irresistibly evokes the sinking of the Titanic 90 years ago. Like the twin towers, the Titanic was a gaudy monument to progress--to state-of-the-art modernity and the crass materialism that came with it. And as with the World Trade Center, the great ship's downfall dramatized the inequities of a system in which ballrooms for the few crowded out lifeboats for the many. Both cataclysms immediately inspired national "narratives" of democratic redemption, in which authentic virtues of discipline, selflessness and brotherhood were reasserted in a heroic defense of civilization. For the Titanic, as Steven Biel writes in "Down With the Old Canoe," his 1996 cultural history of the shipwreck, the moral lesson centered on the conversion of the first cabins' millionaires--epitomized by John Jacob Astor--from heartless plutocrats into gallant martyrs who gave their own lives so that women and children might be saved. The men in uniform who became the heroes of Sept. 11 were the polar opposites of those gentlemen dressed for dinner and death, but their role too was to restore an ethos of action, courage and sacrifice that had been marginalized in a techno-culture dedicated to the pursuit of toys. There was a crucial difference in the way the country processed the earlier blow that may explain why the Sept. 11 aftermath has felt so stale and unsatisfying. Even the most sentimental versions of the Titanic disaster carried a harsh critique of capitalism's dehumanizing excesses. The national soul-searching that followed Sept. 11, however, brooked no such hard look at The System. The reason is obvious: The thing that brought down the twin towers was not the icy indifference of nature but the hot zeal of human beings bent on annihilating our civilization. To criticize that civilization in this context would have seemed traitorous, even murderous. But in our hearts we knew that part of what the jihadists hated about us was what we ought to deplore in ourselves: not "freedom," as the president insisted, but MTV--the trash culture that is our most visible global export. In the surge of patriotic feeling after Sept. 11, the public seemed hungry for something more sustaining than this junk food for the soul. We wanted to be told what we could do for our country. It was a brilliant opportunity for civic renewal, a re-declaration of what it means to be an American. But instead our leaders gave us pep talks advancing the mindless materialism our enemies accuse us of: Don't stop shopping; don't stop taking vacations. Even on this anniversary they cannot find the words to engage us, except in the sacred texts, such as the Gettysburg Address. The genius of our democracy is its tolerance for flux and tension, a recognition that ideals and trash coexist. But if we as a society do not confront the corruption within as forcefully as we fight the terrorism from abroad, then history will force the job on us. Soon after Sept. 11, we were met with an almost pornographic pageant of corporate shame. The enduring mythic image of the past year, to be sure, is the firefighters charging up the stairs of the world's tallest inferno. But superimposed on it is another American icon: a disgraced CEO, trapped in his Texas-size mansion, crying in his white wine over his sad fate. If we are to do true honor to the heroes and innocents who died for their country, we must also acknowledge the civic idols who betrayed it. _________________________________________ Diane McWhorter is the author of "Carry Me Home" (Simon & Schuster), which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. latimes.com

To: JohnM who wrote (42804)	9/9/2002 9:56:46 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Maybe this is one of the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans. Destabilizing Iraq (or Afghanistan) in order to get rid of a despotic regime and liberate it is OK, say Republicans. Democrats say no. Destabilizing Afghanistan in order to draw the Soviets into a protracted war that contributed to the end of the Soviet Union, however, is fine, say Democrats, despite the fact that Afghanistan has suffered for decades afterward, and the rest of the world is suffering blowback from the rise of the Islamists. According to FL, it isn't even questionable. Which is more important in world history: The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few over-exited Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? -Zbignew Brzezinski --fl@yougetthirtysecondstocomeupwiththerightranswer,startingnow.com :o) Amazing. You guys suck at realpolitik. Sorry.