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

To: combjelly who wrote (263951)	12/9/2005 3:22:14 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572542

"Bought time for what? What was the reason for buying time with Iran?" Keeping the status quo between Iraq and Iran. The two never got along and both were roughly equal, so they provided a check on one another. Assuming that's a reasonable explanation for American intervention, we both know things like that rarely work very well. "A nation instinctively wants to look out for its own self interest and the bigger and more powerful the nation, the more likely that nation will do what it can to protect and enhance that self interest." Yep. And what is in our greatest, long term self-interest? No wars, free trade, sophisticated consumers, little or no corruption, etc. In short, a world where every country is at or close to the living standards of the West. See........this is where your argument gets undermined.......by your inherent idealism. When I was in school the first time, I was meeting with a professor and we were discussing and disagreeing over the E. European bloc and its eventual freedom from the Soviet Union. I was absolutely convinced that every one but the Soviets wanted democracy for the eastern bloc. The professor asked me why I believed that was the case........and I cited all of these great and idealistic reasons, starting with Thomas Jefferson and ending up with the movie, Independence Day, had it existed at the time of our discussion. He just laughed. He asked me........what makes you think other people have the same reaction to events, issues, movies etc that you have? I said because those things invoke so much emotion and passion in me and other must feel it too. He laughed again. It was then I realized that my reaction to a set of stimuli and my perception of things may not be the norm at all. In fact, my reaction could well be the exception to the norm. No wars? Free trade? Little or no corruption? Those are things that CJ cares about. I doubt that they are high on the list of the ruling elite in this country. In fact, I bet a lot of them don't even think about those things. Let me take that one step further.......I bet for some of them more wars and less free trade is a desired outcome. Note, this doesn't mean they need to be little carbon copies of Southern California, although the pressures are strong. Things like cheap foreign labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, etc. are nice in the short term, but the situations that gives rise to those things aren't stable. Our time horizon tends to be 3-6 months. A couple of years, tops. I think our time horizon is short because that is not the intent of our leaders. Every fool knows that to get things done right takes time. So why are these people never willing to allot the time? Again, because their goals are not the same as yours or mine. It needs to be much longer or we will continue to get sucked into more things like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq. Either because we see some short term opportunity or just can't ignore the instability any more. Why can't we ignore the instability? Often, the instability in question has little impact on us. Often, the instability takes care of itself. Look at Liberia.......Bush wisely did not go into Liberia and things sorted themselves out in time without are involvement. Case in point, Somalia. We went in there to try to stabilize the situation, but weren't really prepared for it. After flailing about a little, we pulled out. So where is Somalia now? Becoming a modern Tripoli. Sooner or later we will be going back, and it will be a lot harder, because the piracy is becoming a major problem. Let the nations surrounding Somalia take care of the problem. They will when they know we have no intention of doing anything. ted