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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (173622)	3/18/2003 3:05:13 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

OT Lizzie, <Yeah we can vote him out of office, uncerimoneously, in 04.> I see the humor, but anyone who thinks Bush is a greater threat than Saddam (or Kim Jong Il for that matter) ought to think about the quote above for a minute. Now think about the millions of Iraqis and North Koreans who don't have such an option. Tenchusatsu

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (173622)	3/18/2003 11:46:43 PM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 186894

OT Hi Carl & Lizzie & Ten, There are more cost-effective ways to handle this than through war: Intelligence/CIA. More preventive too. CIA work could have prevented 3000 people from being murdered. War, which is highly visible, has the potential to incite not only riots, but this too: "In a conference call Monday evening between CIA officials and the nation's governors, officials said the intelligence community believes there is a near certainty of attacks that would involve mass casualties with maximum economic, psychological and symbolic impact." cnn.com If Bush is so keen on finding terrorists & bin Laden, why only less than twelve FBI agents in Karachi to do so, per a CNN report? I'd rather pay $75k per FBI/CIA agent for highly trained agents to identify terrorists within/outside USA, than pay $4B for a dozen fighter jets that'll eventually end up in the hands of a foreign country. USA builds it - they get it - it's a loop. If the USA wanted to prevent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) from entering a hostile country, the USA would simply 'tag' the equipment and have it returned when done (e.g. didn't USA provide Iraq with WMD when USA was fighting Iran many years ago? did Talibans receive USA WMD when fighting Russia?, etc.). The problem though could be, the USA appears to have a dependency on generating revenue from selling weapons in the $300B defense economy - that's approximately 2 or 3X's more economic stimulus than the funding/capital for the bubble, per year. How would the USA economy live without this $300B annual stimuli? (Just think back to how powerful the investment capital was to the economy during the boom was) Instead of paying $100B for war, for say $40B this country could have instead secured or implemented the following preventive measures: - an earlier change of regime in Baghdad by CIA agents (lower-cost solution rather than expensive, highly visible war that incites terrorists) - reorganize the CIA so that it operates like a company: in high-tech, people at all levels lead. Empower CIA/FBI field agents more than what they currently are. Field agents are the ones that know what's going on - give them the power and the tools and the funding to lead. (Rather than using so much military - 200,000 troops per day is ~$24M/day if $15/hr or $6.2B/yr). - influence a solution to get rid of the middle east problem (which other terrorists seem to use as an excuse to incite their factions). According to my Israeli contacts, they say poverty is the source of Palestinian trouble (not sure why CNN doesn't focus on unemployment issues as the underlying cause rather than religion). They said the ones acting out terrorism were unemployed Palestinians from certain locations. So, maybe the solution there is to engage Israeli gov't/military/business-people on a program to put the 2M Palestinians employed (by launching businesses with the full backing of Israeli gov't) and keep them busy & out of trouble. According to CNN, Palestinians have a 50% unemployment rate, and labor earnings have dropped to $2/day per capita. That's approximately 40% less than China. If 5% of the 2M are the problem-people, that's approximately 100k that need to be kept really busy. The Israelis I know are tired of war & loss of their labor - though at this point, they don't see a peaceful way out of their country's problems, given things have gone so far. - remove any type of segregation of international students at USA schools (e.g. Stanford has some dorms dividing students by ethnicity - Russians go into one dorm, etc.) - and instead mix foreign students with USA students in order to increase the likelihood of better foreign contacts/relations, and thus better influence over future foreign leaders (typically groomed in USA & UK colleges). - step-up enforcement on crimes of hate and eliminate loop-holes that allowed a specific rural judge to make the incorrect ruling that a hate-crime was not a hate-crime. - encourage media reports to show any conflict between countries from both sides to encourage grey thinking (and the ability to understand two conflicting perspectives) rather than black & white thinking. - use CIA agents more than bombs - they're less costly and create fewer incidental riots that destroy businesses and probably don't spawn as many terrorists Regards, Amy J