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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (235098)	5/31/2005 4:02:04 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572003

I'm not an apologist. I just don't think we should spend our lives, our reputation and our dollars trying to change the behavior of Middle East Muslims. Bush and Cheney lead my country; it's my responsibility to try to change their behavior. Prior to 9/11, I would have said exactly the same thing. But we live in a world today where Middle East Muslims have decided for whatever reason that the rest of the world is their enemy, the chief enemy being the U.S. So to ignore that phenomenon is inviting disaster. If we truly want to be safe, then we should spend less time figuring out how to build a missile defense shield and more time figuring out what is motivating those Middle Easterners. We should be figuring out how to work with Middle East countries to reform their education processes and shut down madrasahs and mosques that do nothing but preach hate of Americans. We should be figuring out how to solve our long term dependency on oil through conservation, alternative fuels, and through increased domestic production. Unfortunately, the biggest fault of the Bush administration has always been the lack of imagination and diplomatic skills. They believe that every problem is a nail in need of a sledgehammer (the military response). If it was me, I'd have a multi-pronged plan, only one of which is the military, to solve the Middle Eastern problem. But the last thing I'd do is pretend that we can go on living in a world where we depend on the Middle East for oil and believe we can continue to support dictatorships over there with impunity. Maybe not all of our focus, but certainly a very big chunk of the U.S. focus should be on fixing the Middle East. A broken Middle East will always be a security threat to the U.S.