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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (31714)	2/26/2004 4:41:05 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

The threat is sufficient that we cannot sit back and wait for them to prove to us that they are dangerous. Nadine, I haven't been arguing that we sit back. In fact, I said straight out a couple of posts ago that we should wipe them out and/or make sure they don't get nukes. What I have been arguing is simply that we should not be scared of them, that the risk is small, much smaller than the risk from things about which we're not very scared, that it's not rational to be scared because, while they may have the motive in spades, there is negligible probability that they have the means and opportunity to do a whole lot of damage. Each of us has a much better chance of being killed in a car accident, yet we both use cars. That's all I'm arguing. If you want to make the argument that it's a good idea for our leaders to keep us artificially scared because otherwise we would start to "sit back" while the risk grows I could understand that. But I find no basis for an assertion that fear is justified right now. The evidence for what they've got now is largely unknown to any of us, since we are not the CIA. That is true. We agreed early on about the unknowns. But all indications are that the probability that they have the weapons and the delivery mechanism is small. I imagine that, if they had it, they would have used it by now. The risk of a commandeered aircraft continues to be the greatest threat based upon what we can infer from our country's threat response. While horrible, such an event is self-limiting in terms of casualties and minor relative to the flu or traffic accidents or heart disease or drugs or a whole bunch of other things that kill bunches and bunches of people.