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

To: William B. Kohn who wrote (68739)	1/25/2003 1:39:15 PM
From: MSI	Respond to of 281500

Ahh, the fear factor Exactly what we have, starting when this regime of experts took over the Executive Branch. Oddly enough, no one expects that to change as long as current confused policies are pursued. The CIA expects it to accelerate. Question: what is your estimate of the future of domestic US terrorism based on your recommended course of aggressive action? The answer to that question is critical to any discussion of this topic. Without fear (of terrorism, counter-terrorism, aerial bombardment, biowarfare, dirty bombs...) preemptive domestic and international political control fades. Completely unlike your comparison to WWII, we have been attacked by, as admitted by Rumsfeld, "undeterrables", who will be recruited from multiple countries in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, for suicide missions for religious reasons, aided by the carnage, in Iraq and elsewhere. That is unlike any such examples you cite. For other reasons as well: "Look at Israel" - as much a fan of Jewish culture as I am, their FP approach is more like "lebensraum", at the same time as their opponents are implacable and similarly religiously driven. I suspect unlike you, I've spent time there, and have conclusions based on personal knowledge and experience. They are IMO, insane fanatics, on both sides. The US has absolutely no business being involved in any such blood feuds, it is has nothing to do with "making the world safe for democracy" nor US strategic interests, except oil or Brzezinski's "disrupt potential foreign coalitions and maintain US global hegemony" As Kissinger of all people said about the Indian/Paki feud, "we do not have the answers to their problems" (referring only to military solutions, of course, rather than the more powerful and more commonsense American cultural and business influence) To the contrary, the relationship to US national security is precisely inverse - the greater our military and foreign aid involvement, the greater the number of deaths and threats of death to Americans. The CIA reports the same, and the US military is being forced into this unwise venture only by threats of declaring opponents guilty of "treason". Unlike the adventures in Latin America, the ME has orders of magnitude greater resources, numbers of religious fanatics. Unlike Europe or Japan in WWII, it's no help thinking we can reduce a dozen Islamist countries to smoking ruins in retaliation. Even threats of such clearly improve recruiting by warlords among the hopeless fanatics, and are the kind of thing expected of other fanatics, not the US. Two other questions: Are you one of those who believes the US can calmly occupy as many Islamist countries as necessary? Or are you hoping a few "Gulf I"-type wars will settle the issue?