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

To: skinowski who wrote (151456)	12/17/2005 12:20:14 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793550

<//WOT is a silly little sideshow,// You really think so? It seems the jihadis are a very determined bunch... > Yes. The WOT has been going for 15 years, and 25 if you go back a bit more and include Gorby's efforts against Islamic Jihad and their supporters; Ronald Raygun and before him, Jimmy Carter. It's funny that Americans were supporting Osama against Gorby. They should ponder that and what it in fact meant. So, how big a show is the WOT? Let's count the bodies, which is what concerns most of us. Osama and co have killed, or near enough to it, maybe 10,000, with 3,000 in one go in the Twin Towers box-cutter spectacular. That's including attacks in Israel. The Vietnam war was a total horror show by comparison with millions dead and more than 10,000 Americans [the WOT score]. That was trivial compared with Japan's empire-building efforts and a single extermination camp in the Third Reich did the total WOT harm in a week or three. What went on in WWI and WWII and during Mao's and Stalin's maraudings were another level again. Sure, Islamic Jihad has potential, just as Adolf had in the 1920s. But really, it's a sideshow. The cyberspace revolution is vastly more significant, just as the industrial revolution was vastly significant and the Boer War and charge of the light brigade mere footnotes to history. The main victory of Osama and co, and the authoritarians in governments in the "free world" is to have everyone hassled at airport security, and elsewhere. If the worst that happens is hassle at airports and a few random civilian killings by trigger-happy security people, I'm not going to whine too loudly in comparison with WWI, WWII etc. Mqurice PS: I suppose we could go back to the establishment of Israel, and dissolution of the Ottoman empire, which boosts the numbers. If, as the Iranian president said, Israel hadn't been formed by the UN, maybe things would have been better in the WOT front. But things are as they are, as they were then, and the point is to pick the best way to go from here. There still would have been the ring of fire around Islam, with East Timor, western China, Kashmir, Beslan and so on and on and on and on to deal with.