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

To: Ilaine who wrote (49942)	10/7/2002 12:05:31 PM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

Until recently, there were no export controls on biologicals that could be used for bioweapons. the US sold the stuff to 'friend' Saddam - this is called killing me softly - but this should be a strategic decision, not a moral one. Politics as usual, but it’s a bit rich to buy into the cover of help, when Iraqis are in dire straits. Saddams indiscretions aside, why are we bombing water desalination plants. The only point to this is containment and in the bigger picture, destabilization. Will they be with us or against us when we show up, will they conflate their perception of the moral and the strategic - this depends on the context, which is yet to unfold, which is why we’re seeing such mixed opinions on this. But it is the claim that he was our creation that I am challenging. Who here recently made that claim. You are being forced into pedantics and a discrete position which obscures the dynamic, what difference does it make at this point whether or not the CIA actually handed bin Laden some bills directly, this is the old 'looking for evidence where it may not exist' boondogle, it is a waste of time. imo, and of course it’s easy to say this with hindsight, for bin laden Afghanistan was a Proxy fight and since the US was in the middle of one themselves, they couldn’t see it. Fatal flaw in perception. The decision to help Islamic Militants was considered 'moral', a rationalisation under the circumstances. US support of him was tactically expedient in the short term, and I’ve no doubt that when it was 'over', the complexities on the ground made staying seem like a bad idea, but abandoning Afghanistan, or at the least not dealing a death blow to bin laden/ al quaida was a massive strategic blunder in the long term. Seems we did this out of consideration for our 'friend', Saudi Arabia. This is a classic case of fight or flight, a symptomatic response which leads to either escalation or escape. These things are what is apparent, but the trick of the trade is to make them transparent, which you cannot do when you do not see the forest, which seem to be disappearing, for the trees, which we plant by the thousand as replacements . A failure to separate, tactics and trust, strategy and morality, the temporary from the eternal, the man, from the place and the time is the source of the error. The inverse of this is more plainly known as thinking ahead. If the US is serious about putting it’s interests first it helps if they can be properly identified, but this would be moral nirvana and in utopia, unlike in hell, things may seem perfect, but somehow no-one can agree with each other on what needs to be done, I think thats why it says on our money, In God we Trust, and if this isn’t true, why are they lying to us. If our interests are supposed to be moral then why do we get them mixed up, the paradox of politics, otherwise known as a win-win situation can only solved when they are aligned.