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

To: unclewest who wrote (116371)	10/8/2003 9:40:57 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi unclewest; Re: "LBJ was certainly not Catholic nor was Nixon." Both LBJ RMN were Christians. Neither was Buddhist. They got along better with the Vietnamese Christians (Catholics) than they did with the Vietnamese Communists (Atheists) or the Vietnamese unaligned (Buddhists). Birds of a feather flock together. Humans too. Re: "IF necessary, we could blame the Catholic connection in Vietnam on France. They started the Catholic conversions prior to the battle of Dien Bin Phu." I'm not sure what you mean by "blame". I think westernizing the east is a good thing. The bad thing is getting bogged down in a land war in Asia without a healthy local ally to fill the body bags. Our culture is demonstrably superior in many ways to that of the locals in Vietnam (and Iraq too), and, given time, our way of life will reign supreme. The US is a collection of a wide variety of the world's ethnic groups, and all those ethnic groups brought their local customs to this country. The customs that survived (generally in some modified form), were the ones that were strongest, and those same customs are being steadily exported back across the world. For example, the simple fact that we allowed the Chinese to export goods to the US caused them to end up embracing our cultural holidays like Christmas. And we didn't have to do a damned thing, all that happened is that their factories, making goods for the US, saw an opportunity to create a local market. No US boys had to die to inject US culture into China. We did it without even a single government program, just based on the attractiveness of our way of life. That's what the 3rd world used to call "cultural imperialism", and that is what Osama and pals are most afraid of -- that they'll grow old in a society that looks more and more like the US. Re: "But let us never forget that the Muslims brought this current war to us." At the time that the US decided to begin supporting the Israelis over the Arabs, not a single act of terror had ever been committed against the continental US. We made ourselves the big buddy of Israel, and ended up with Israel's stupid foreign policy problems. This whole concept of "the Arabs started it" is silly, the kind of thing I expect to hear from little children: "she hit me back first". And in our case, to claim that the Arabs started it is more than a gross distortion of the truth, it's a simple f'ing lie. We're the "superpower" that had to stick its nose into the Middle East. They're a bunch of camel riders who mostly aspire to nothing more than owning convenience stores and getting the Israelis out of Israel. They had no problem with the US before we made supporting Israel a top foreign policy concern. We stuck our noses into a 2500 year-old pissing match and then got all "holier than thou" when we got hit. Where are the 140,000 Arab troops occupying the US and shooting the crap out of our civilians? Your comment is simply divorced from reality. I realize that this sort of sentiment is important for the task of convincing the nation to fight, but the problem with propaganda like that is that it is very unconvincing. Re: "The NYT quoted obl, “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.” The avowed goal of Muslim extremists (whether Taliban, AQ, Hizbollah or Hamas) is to kill all Jews, Kill all Americans, Kill all Christians." (1) I don't agree that Osama speaks for even most Moslems. (2) I don't agree that Osama is capable of killing even most Americans, let alone "all". (3) I don't agree that our foreign policy is making Americans more safe from being killed. There is an engineering saying that if a man's only tool is a hammer, all his problems become nails. With the US, our only truly efficient tool is our military, so we try to solve our problems with wars. Osama is a criminal, not an enemy country. Trying to use the military to perform police work doesn't work any better in Iraq, 2003, than it did in Vietnam, 1964. Hunting terrorists with the US military is like trying to kill flies with sledgehammers. Sure you kill a few, but you end up doing a lot of damage that tends to breed even more flies. Re: "Considering their progress towards that goal over the last 10 years don't you think it is time to take the Muslim extremists seriously, regardless of how many Christians may or may not be in their midst?" I agree that Muslim extremists should be taken seriously. I don't agree that Bush's policy is effective. What he is doing has already been proven ineffective by the Israelis, who thought of it first. Where is Osama bin Laden? The simple truth is that if Bush had kept it in his pants with Iraq, the whole Moslem middle east would be happier with us now, and more likely to cooperate in bringing down Al Qaeda. What Bush did was to make a hero out of Osama, ruin our efforts in Afghanistan, make a mockery out of the notion that the US supports freedom, and probably lock the Republican party out of the White House for years to come. I should note that Schwarzneggar's election was quite a relief to me. It shows that the American people are not (yet) blaming the Republican party for Bush's war. -- Carl