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

To: quehubo who wrote (80795)	3/9/2003 8:05:36 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

> Are you withholding your support in our fight against Al Qaeda because we helped create allot the devils in the first place? Not at all. I want to see Al-Qaeda burn in Hell. But we have a history of being just too shortsighted. And until we acknowledge that, I see no hope for a change. Consider this: US supported the Ba'th party and helped them come to power (that is Saddam's party). Then we decided they were no good and had Shah of Iran wage a proxy war with Iraq. Then we decided that Ba'thies have seen the light and asked Shah to pull away and leave the Kurds at tender mercies of the Iraqi regime. Later, we decided we don't like Iraq again. Then we decided that we like them so much that we will give them any financial, military, or intelligence help they want. We went so far as to help Saddam with his WMD program. Soon after the war with Iran was over, Saddam became a bad guy again. But as soon as he was out of Kuwait, he was good enough for us to support him against the people's uprising and let him send gunships to massacre the civilians. Now we are complaining that he owns weapons that we sold him and that he used them on people we prevented from over throwing him in the first place. Now this is a ton of SNAFU don't you think? In each of these cases some very intelligent people thought they were acting in accordance to our national interest. And yet every single one of them were wrong. Please don't read me the justifications for each of those actions at the time. I am pretty well versed in the history and culture of the region. The fact remains that we were wrong and we tittered too much. The reasons we were wrong are similar to why so many very smart people cannot outperform the stock market. Quite simply the world is too dynamic for that kind of linear reasoning. The only method that really does work is one that is based on ethics and principles rather than interests. This approach is quite evident in our own everyday life and I don't see why it is so hard to expect governments to work as ethically on the international stage than the average person does in their everyday life. BTW, ethics is not something you do to ensure a great after-life or do for good conscience. Ethics is what human beings have developed as the best way to ensure their progress. It is so important that it has become part of our genetic make up. Ponder on that for a while. People who did not have ethics did not survive long enough to pass their genes to future generations. So I think it is important that we pay attention to ethical principles rather than short term interests. best regards, Sun Tzu