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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (11888)	2/14/2006 11:14:36 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540747

That is a very valid point, but you could speculate how Latin American leftism could do the same, how Chinese militancy could do the same, how Russian nationalism could wreck Europe (and NATO so it's our problem), and so on. How many theaters do we engage with preemptive wars and invasions to head off tenuous future threats? All serious propositions to sort through. But our responses have to be commensurate with both the realistic threat and our limited resources.

To: carranza2 who wrote (11888)	2/14/2006 1:28:13 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 540747

The fact that the terrorist threat is not presently existential is not really open to argument. I don't think so, either, which is why it's so problematic that so many people argue so strenuously that it is. I haven't been able to talk anyone out of it in myriad tries. It's a mind set that enables anyone who advocates a proportional response or who questions the current response to be considered "unserious" or "un-American." However, this is not to say that Islamic terrorism could eventually gather sufficient assets and morph into something quite substantial in the future. I agree with that, too, which is why I think that we should respond with a plan to forstall or obviate that possibility. At the very least we should do nothing to facilitate or expedite it. It seems to me that this is the context in which we should be discussing our activities in the ME, not the context of smiting evil-doers.