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

To: TimF who wrote (7974)	12/29/2006 12:09:53 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15994

in the long run if we don't fight them they will be able to control territory. Communism had intellectual appeal. One of their big mistakes was thinking they could spread their ideology by force. If they don't have the support of the hearts and minds of the people, they weren't going anywhere. In the end, they lost because they couldn't make the case that they had a better way to advance civilization. Jihadism does not have any intellectual appeal. Communism was a much bigger threat than Jihadism could ever be. Days when you can conquer people by force are gone. Days when you can go through life fooling around and wake up when you are 40 years full of anger and think you have something to offer the world is over. The Internet has changed everything. The world is now fully connected. Everybody has access to information and knowledge. You are not going to fool people. World leaders will have to be better prepared. They will have to start their education early. They will have to be disciplined in their pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. Same thing goes for successful societies. They will have to be more competitive economically. They will get a competitive edge with a good education. They will have to be able to solve problems using knowledge from science, technology and the liberal arts. People in China and India are desperately trying to catch up. They think they can do this through science and technology. I don't think they will ever catch up in this way. It is not just science and technology where you have to succeed. You also need the more intangibles that a liberal arts education contributes to the advancement of civilization. We have the best institutions of higher education the world has ever known (eg Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, Duke University and on and on......). It will take China and India several hundred years to catch up unless of course if we don't destroy our system on our own. There are people in our society that do not value our greatest assets - the University system and the people that run those universities. Instead of trying to convince people intellectually, to win their hearts and minds, there are those that want to waste our resources by focusing on a military solution to spread our way of life.