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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chomolungma who wrote (67712)	2/10/2003 12:09:41 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

I am glad you asked. There is an old saying, "tell me who your friends are and I tell you who you are". I used to beat this into my youngest brother's head so he'd stay away from the kids involved in drugs and gangs. Nations are not viewed so differently either. The people in poor countries like everywhere else in the world, blame their government for their problems and want progress. The problem is that those politicians came to power with the help of US and are often kept in power with the aid from US. This causes the tremendous anger of the people to be redirected towards America. Of course as Ski pointed out, there are "justifications" for our support of these corrupt governments. But those justifications are just valid for too short of period. Afterwards, the changing dynamics of the world puts us in greater peril. For example, Bush Sr actively prevented the Shia in Iraq to take control of the country during the Gulf War. His reasoning was that he wanted to maintain the balance of power against Iran. But to the slaughtered men, women, and children in the south, that is not a good enough reason to be kept under Saddam's boots. Hence their anger gets directed at America. It will be a very long time in which the Iraqi people will like the US no matter what America does. To be fair, I don't think the State department approves of every dirty deed these governments do. I am sure they would have prefered to have a humane and pro-american regime in Iraq instead of Saddam. But in the final analysis, humanity and fairness take a back seat to our rampant wants. For the first time in world history there exists a nation, US of A, that can bring about real world stability and peace. We can bring about a new dawn of humanity! We cannot do this by being a global police or a global babysitter. Rather we must act as a moral person would (I don't expect us to become angels either; choose someone you know whose ethics you admire, that is good enough). We should identify strategic positions that we absolutely positively need (rather than want). After we secure those, we should establish a non-interference pact with the world whereby we give up our support for all these corrupt "client" regimes around the world and in return the rest of the world agrees not to meddle in the internal affairs of others either. We'll bolster such a plan by creating a trading organization that will split this "peace dividend" around the world. The world will go along with this because initially we are "giving up" more than they are. But in the end we will all come out as winners. Sun Tzu PS on the more narrow issues that you pointed out, since it is US support that is keeping those oppressive Arab regimes in power, we do have a lot of power over what goes on in there. As you have pointed out lack of education and economic opportunity is a great cause of discontent. That however cannot change so long as we support the less competent leaders who are extremely pro US against the more competent ones who have a more neutral stance. Regarding Israel, I agree with you that blind support of Israel is not in the interest of this nation. In the middle east people quite litteraly do not distinguish between Israel and United States. So whatever Israel does is seen asif it was done by America. Perhaps errecting a chinese wall around the entire area and leaving them alone will force them to settle their issues. PPS did you know there is evidence that US supported Ayatolah and the Islamic revolution in Iran? Not only it backfired and posed Iran against US, to the Iranian opposition, US is the root cause of their misery. Talk about getting hit on both sides!