On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 09:49:12PM -0500, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > But India, oddly enough without the benefit of billions of dollars of > American aid, doesn't look like that, does it? Not at all.
I missed your point here. Do you mean that India doesn't hate the West? I don't think you mean that poverty is rare in India. Anyway, if it is an important point, please explain. I am not arguing that poverty always lead to hate, only that in some cases it seems to (maybe it is more likely that it will in an Islamic culture?). Perhaps you meant that since poverty did not lead to hate in India, that it cannot happen elsewhere? > All of that is an excuse, anyways, since the people in Pakistan who > are actually terrorists are not actually poor. It's the Pakistani > middle class and elites, as it is in the Middle East, who most support > terrorism. So this is an excuse. Those small children aren't the > terrorists. The people who are able to fight, fight. The poor are less able to fight, the wealthy are more able. At least one of the wealthy in Pakistan, Brigadier Amanullah, says the he would use the nuclear weapons primarily because of the extreme poverty (he believes they have nothing to lose). You would claim that the motives of the terrorists are not the same as those stated by Amanullah. How would you back up this claim? > Me: Resolve means making sure that they don't get nuclear weapons, I thought that Pakistan has been testing nuclear weapons. Aren't they believeed to possess nuclear weapons? > and taking them away if they get them and seem to threaten us. Taking them away???? Easier said than done. With crazy people who believe they have nothing to lose in a nuclear war? MAD doesn't work. And no one wins a nuclear war. But the Western world has a lot more to lose in a nuclear war than terrorists do. > That there are no rewards to terrorism - that, in fact, any > organization that attacks us will be destroyed. Do that and the > terrorism will stop. I wish I could be as certain as you. It seems to me that as long as there are people living under oppressive regimes in abject poverty, new terrorists will continually appear. And eventually, some of these terrorists will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, and be desperate and crazy enough to use them. I think it is impossible to stamp out terrorism with force. I don't think it is easy to eliminate terrorism, but I think fighting it with economic assistance is more likely to prevent mass deaths than fighting it with force. > Why are countries like Pakistan poor? Why are they, when you get > down to it, hellholes? They are like that precisely _because_ of the > influence of the Islamists and the dictators - of the influence of > those people who are most supportive of the terrorists. It is their > policies that are responsible for the poverty. I mostly agree with this. > The best thing we could do for those countries is to show that their > is no route to victory through violence and terror. Ah, but there is a route to victory for them. They get a few nuclear bombs and detonate them in large Western cities. I don't think we can forcefully keep that from happening if they are strongly inclined to do so. But maybe we can reduce the hatred somewhat, and help them to have enough to live for, that a nuclear war would no longer be a victory for them. > Let me tell you the analogy that springs to mind here, Erik. From > what I can tell, you want us to conduct a Marshall Plan. I'm entirely > in favor of that. The problem is, you want us to do it in 1940. > First you have to win the war. Back then, the enemy had no weapons of mass destruction. I think that changes things significantly. I don't think we can win a war of civilian death and destruction. So we need to prevent that war. MAD won't work. What else is there but economic assistance? It wouldn't be as effective as the Marshall Plan (since, as you say, we didn't win the war), but maybe it would be effective enough. > We can, and should, do everything we can to make these countries > better places to live. But we _can't_ do that until they have decent > governments, until the people of these countries have given up their > alignment with Bin Laden and radical Islam. Why not? What is stopping us? I think you mean, not "can't" but "shouldn't". I think that is precisely what we SHOULD do. We can't force an entire culture to change. Sticks alone don't work. You need a carrot. You might say, first the stick then the carrot. The problem is, I think, that we will never reach the carrot if we start with the stick. Maybe it would work if we were only fighting governments, who behave at least somewhat rationally and have something to lose. But we are talking about fighting terrorists, fighting individuals. > Do you want to be Churchill or Chamberlain? They both wanted the best > for Europe. But Churchill understood the nature of his enemy - he > saw that appeasement would only strengthen Hitler's hold on Germany. > Chamberlain didn't. We have a similar choice today. Not similar. Two differences I mentioned above. We are fighting individual terrorists, not just governments. And we are fighting those who have nuclear weapons. We should do anything and everything we can to avoid getting involved in a war of civilian casualties with weapons of mass destruction against an enemy with no clear target to strike against. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
