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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22786)	3/30/2005 5:05:40 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81900

> Actually I wonder what the message is because everyone knows the US has that stuff? And maybe they should be sure it works before they actually use it. usatoday.com >>The U.S. military's Abrams tank, designed during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents. ....since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with tanks in daily combat against the unexpectedly fierce insurgency, the Army says 80 of the 69-ton behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be shipped back to the United States. "It's a thinking enemy, and they know weak points on the tank, where to hit us," says Col. Russ Gold, who commanded an armored brigade in Iraq and now is chief of staff at the Armor Center. Because it was designed to fight other tanks, the Abrams' heavy armor is up front. In Iraq's cities, however, insurgents sneak up from behind, fire from rooftops above and set off mines below.<<

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22786)	3/31/2005 8:34:08 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81900

> The US will go into WW3, if it happens, with the intention of clinging to its position as the world's only superpower in a hegemony of nations which is increasingly denying the US that status news.cincypost.com >>Great powers on the brink of decline typically have incoherent and foredoomed strategies to ward off their fate, simply because no better strategies are available. "I have not become His Majesty's first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British empire,'' Winston Churchill harrumphed in 1940 - but from the Spanish armada of 1588 to the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, the flailing efforts of paramount powers to ward off impending demotion from "superpower'' status have generally just hastened the process. How might this apply to the senior people inside the Bush administration? Some of them clearly believe exactly what they say, no matter how simplistic and delusional it may appear to outsiders, but others genuinely are strategic thinkers. These people will not speak in traditional power-political terms in public - instead they will use the "terrorist threat'' or any other excuse that comes to hand to justify their strategies - but they know about the coming erosion of American power and they will be desperately seeking ways to avoid it. Is the invasion of Iraq, and the whole project of resurrecting Pax Americana that lies behind it, just such an attempt to head off impending relative decline by putting the U.S. back in the global driving seat, as much the "leader of the free world'' as it was in the halcyon days of the Cold War? Very likely. Will it work? Don't be silly. It never works: economics rules, and there is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower short of nuking their entire economies. And no: I don't think they'd do that. But their little adventure will almost certainly have the long-term effect of hastening America's relative decline. That sort of strategy usually does.<<