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

To: KLP who wrote (100554)	6/7/2003 12:48:52 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi KLP; Re: "You have such anger, and have had for some time. I feel anger too. Except my anger is directed against the people who killed thousands of Americans and citizens of so many other countries in the world on 9-11 and all the other days they have tried to terrorize Americans everywhere." The basic problem with your emotions is that you ignore the facts on the ground. We cannot separate the people who did 9/11 from the innocent bystanders, except when we go into these countries with very limited forces. (Like when we used a Predator missile to destroy that car filled with terrorists in some obscure Arab state.) You can't pick out the innocent from the guilty any more than the Israelis can punish just the Palestinians who terrorize them. Because of this undeniable fact (go ahead and try to deny it), our attempts at punishing terrorists with large armed forces, inevitably turns into collective punishment of the countries where those terrorists live. And the effect of that is to further anger the other side. I'm not arguing against punishing terrorists. I'm not saying that collective punishment is immoral. What I'm saying is that collective punishment of societies where terrorists live is simply not effective. Intelligent people do not pursue their goals through ineffective means. By the way, the concept that collective punishment / reward works should have died with Communism. Both Communism and the current Administration foreign policy were the products of weak minds, people who could not see things from the other side's point of view. They were like chess players who don't take into account that the other guy gets to move pieces around the board too. That collective punishment is ineffective is a universal human trait, but even the racists who believe that the Arabs are somehow different should look to the Israeli history for a verification that the collective punishment of Arabs does not result in a reduction in their terrorism. You can reduce terrorism over the short run by instituting policies that reduce the ability of all Arabs to move around in your cities, but if this policy actually was a solution, the Israelis would not have the problems that they do today. Bush's actions are a repeat of an experiment that has already been run, and it failed. If you want to make US citizens safe from Arab terrorism, simply quit supporting Israel militarily, and instead treat the Arab nations on an equal footing with Israel. The Canadians aren't subject to terrorist attacks, why should we be? Re: "And get yourself some Top Secret clearances so that you will know." BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! LOL!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Hey, that's the neocon argument from before the war. It's too late to use it now. The word before the war was that Bush had the facts, but he couldn't share it with us because it was top secret. He'd show us Iraq's WMDs within days of the fall of Baghdad. Now it's past time for the weapons to show up. Remember back in late April when FaultLine said the non existence of WMDs was off topic until June? My guess is that FaultLine was a believer, and is truly quite shocked that they weren't found. Hey I know, maybe Bush's top secret decoder ring had a manufacturing defect. He got a message from the CIA and DIA that said "There are no WMDs in Iraq, as far as we can tell.", but he translated it as "There are new WMDs in Iraq, as far as we can tell." At least that's what the CIA and DIA are saying, LOL. -- Carl