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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DayTraderKidd who wrote (7827)	12/20/2006 4:01:53 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15987

That was the place to wage an iraq type of war. Afghanistan was the place to change that culture Afghanistan is less secular than Iraq is. Despite being brutally repressive, the Ba'thists were originally a secular nationalist movement. And now we're seeing the militant extremist muslim factions attempting to turn it into a Jihadist state. This simply cannot be permitted to happen. Even if losing Iraq to them doesn't result in economic turmoil due to oil reserves, we cannot permit the Jihadists to control those revenues. Give them that kind of capital to play with and you're going to see a drastic increase in terror attacks. Afghanistan is a backwater and I agree that it's going to take decades to develop some kind of functional economy/society there. But Iraq is a far different scenario. Hawk

To: DayTraderKidd who wrote (7827)	12/20/2006 6:09:21 PM
From: teevee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15987

I have said before that afghanistan was ripe... still is... That was the place to wage an iraq type of war. Afghanistan was the place to change that culture. It would take 30 years to see reults and another 30 for it to really take hold. It takes a long time to get that way, takes a long time to change I suggest you put your views in the context of James Lovelock's book, The Revenge of Gaia - Earth's Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity. If Lovelock's theories are correct, the mid latitudes around the world will be unfit for human habitation in less than 50 years. That means that Darfur, the Mediterranean, the entire middle east etc will become empty deserts making even the heart of Australia look like an oasis. Inter tribal strife will only become more intense in the short term (next 3 decades). Thankfully North America will be buffered by the coming tsunami of human refugees to more northerly areas. We will have enough problems of our own as temperatures and sea level rises. In short, perhaps we should start to look at our presence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as "frontier" holding actions only, and to keep those "Moslem tribes" from obtaining the financial capability to attack us on our own "tribal homelands".