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

To: FaultLine who wrote (43214)	9/11/2002 9:32:26 AM
From: aladin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

FL, Upgraded my wife to the new IMac with the 17" flat panel last night. OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) is incredible and the wierdest thing its the best platform for Microsoft Office I have ever used. Maybe MS should stick to apps :-) My teenagers with their 2gig P4 were more than a little suprised at how well it worked with our video and still cameras right out of the box (he has been struggling with firewire and movies). My work uses PC's for a standard desktop - but at least I get a Sun for programming and technical work! John

To: FaultLine who wrote (43214)	9/11/2002 9:58:38 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Let's pick fights, enemies with prudence By Bruce Ramsey Seattle Times editorial columnist Wednesday, September 11, 2002 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific I suppose I am one of those who "blame America first." That is the accusation hurled at anyone who suggests that this country helped to bring the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, upon itself. The natural attitude, here and elsewhere, is to blame everything on the enemy. Why do these blowhards hate us? Because of who we are? Our president said that, as did many others. The terrorists, it was said, hate us for our R-rated movies and our feminism, our hot dogs and our human rights, for our Christianity and our agnosticism. They hate us for being Americans. And if that is so, there is nothing to discuss, because we are not going to change who we are. We shall have to fight them. But is that explanation believable? Would people who live halfway around the world hate us because of who we are? Would they ignore the Germans and the French, shrug off the Japanese and the Chinese, but be mortally offended by the Americans? Ask Middle Easterners why they hate us, and they say they don't. They do offer a sharp criticism of our government. They detest our government's support of Israel, which they see as an expanding blob of Europeans pushing out people like them. Osama bin Laden gave three reasons why the United States is his mortal enemy: 1. America's alliance with Israel; 2. American bases in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim holy land; and 3. The 10-year embargo of Iraq, which has caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die. These are not reasons to hate Americans for who they are. They are political reasons. They are things done by the governments we elected. That doesn't mean we have to accept these reasons as just cause for a massacre of civilians in New York — of course not! — but we might ask whether someone else would. It is to inquire into the risks we bear because of what our government does. We cannot expect it to reliably defend us against suicide attacks, and especially so with our tradition of liberty. In the past year we have allowed it to snoop on us, to detain suspects without trial, to harass us at airports and X-ray our shoes. And still we worry. Americans might be asking: Are our undertakings in the Middle East worth what we're giving up here? Instead we are thinking about whether to invade, conquer and occupy Iraq, on the theory that a war will make us safer. Others would insert us in even deeper into the Middle East. In Time magazine, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says, "Change must also come to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran [and] the Palestinian Authority... America's voice, as expressed by our government, must be outspoken in support of democratization in all of these countries." Author Michael Ledeen laid it out in the Wall Street Journal: "We should instead be talking about using all our political, moral and military genius [my italics] to support a vast democratic revolution to liberate all the peoples of the Middle East from tyranny." Americans were raised on such talk, which imbues everything from political speeches to World War II movies. We do not hear the tone of moral imperialism in it. Foreigners pick it up immediately. They ask: "Who appointed you the world's policeman?" The American attitude is what China calls "hegemonism," the presumptions of a country that undertakes to manage the world. And further — a country that now undertakes to manage it mostly alone. Tired of years of coalitions and compromises, Americans reach back for the freedom of action they had when America spoke only for itself. The clarity of it does feel better, and we do not want to give that up. And so it comes natural to say that such-and-so is Saddam Hussein's fault, or bin Laden's, and not even a little bit our own — because then we would be "blaming America first." If we really want the freedom to act alone, let us make sure the fights we enter are our own. We should be asking why we have these enemies at all. They are poor and far away, and they might not hate us if we left them alone. _________________________________________________ Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com. Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company seattletimes.nwsource.com