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? Me: No, I mean that India is a wealthy country compared to Pakistan. The poverty doesn't approach the same levels. And people in India have hope for the future. They live in a democracy. They live in a free society. They know that things can get better. Nigeria is poor - did Nigerians blowi up buildings in NYC? Saudi Arabia is _not_ poor. But it was Saudis who did it. Your correlation doesn't work. Poor people aren't terrorists. And terrorists aren't poor. > 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: No, I'm saying that Amanullah is just making an excuse for what he wants to do - destroy the infidel. The poverty, all of that, that's just an excuse. What he wants to do is destroy India. If you want to fix poverty, you fix poverty - you don't spend tens of billions of dollars building useless nuclear weapons and killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Kashmir. When you do that, I for one think that maybe it's not poverty that concerns you. > 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? Me: They have nuclear weapons. At the moment, the Pakistani government is relatively secular, and not immediately dangerous to us. If the Pakistani government fell, then we should destroy the nuclear weapons. It's well within the capacity of the American government. You don't think we had plans to do exactly that? I'm quite certain that we did . > 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. Me: A nuclear war? We aren't dealing with the Soviet Union. The B-2 bomber was designed to find Soviet ICBMs mounted on railways in the middle of Siberia. Finding them in Pakistan would be somewhat easier, to put it mildly. It is precisely _because_ MAD doesn't work that we cannot allow these people to acquire nuclear weapons. What would you do if Bin Laden got them, ask him very nicely not to put them in New York? > 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. Me: Erik, if you know how to develop Pakistan, there's a fairly prestigious award handed out in Sweden waiting for you. Good luck. Giving money to bad governments tends to strengthen the bad government. I don't want to do that. > 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. Me: But that's not a victory condition for them. That happens and the Middle East starts glowing in the dark. We have the capacity to do that, and if enough nuclear weapons went off in Western cities, we would, in the end. But we can do everything possible to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of these people. The Israelis did it at Osirak. God help the world now if they hadn't - Saddam Hussein would have nuclear weapons and probably control 60% of the world's oil. > 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. Me: Erik, did you see what happened in Afghanistan? Did that look like MAD to you? There are lots of things between turning the Middle East into glass and economic assistance. Economic assistance of most forms would probably make things worse, actually, because it would strengthen governments that we want _weakened_. At the moment our enemies _don't have_ weapons of mass destruction. I think it's a good idea to make sure that they never get them. We can do that. At the least we have to try. And the first step involves Iraq. > 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. Me: Who is more powerful in Syria, us or the Syrian government? I mean we _can't_. I tend to say what I mean, and I know the difference between can't and shouldn't. We can't help these countries while their governments are the way they are. We _can_ get an entire culture to change, by demonstrating that there is no success in the avenue that they've chosen. Then they will choose another. We got German culture to change. We got Japanese culture to change. You have the order exactly wrong. The aid can only come after we win. We _shouldn't_ have pumped money into Occupied France in 1940. Luckily we _didn't_. Instead we smashed the Nazis. Then we gave them money. _Terrorists are not individuals_. The individual terrorist without a home base, without a network, without a country giving him refuge and support, is not dangerous. Only terrorists with a place of refuge, with logistical support, with funding, with places to train without disruption, only they are dangerous. _We can take those away_. We must. > 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/ Me: Don't you think if Bin Laden already had weapons of mass destruction he might have used them? Actually, he did. The explosive yields in 9/11 were equivalent to a small nuclear weapon. The very first priority of American foreign policy is making sure that these people _don't get_ weapons of mass destruction. You keep saying we're fighting those who have nuclear weapons. Do you know somethign we don't? Second, we are fighting _state-supported_ terrorists. An individual with an AK-47 is not terribly dangerous to us. We can and must smash the organizations that can get 20 people together and train them. That is the danger, and that we can fight. More, we can defeat the popular support for those organizations. And we can only do that by showing that those organizations cannot win. We were warned that if we bombed durign Ramadan and invaded Afghanistan, the Arab street would rise up against us. I don't see it happening, do you? Maybe because things don't work that way. When we defeated the fanatics, their popular support collapsed. When Hitler was defeated, people stopped supporting him. If he had been stopped at the beginning, they wouldn't have followed him. If we had killed Bin Laden 5 years ago - as we should have, and could have done - then he wouldn't be a hero, would he? Because people wouldn't think that he could win. Gautam
