>From an otherwise excellent examination of the issues you wrote: > You wrote "I can't be sure it's true". I can't be sure either either but, > dangerous though Bush's present policy is, it seems to me that inaction by > Bush is even more dangerous (that is, from Bush's point of view concerning > the American economy). There might have been other ways of tackling the > whole issue of the Middle East earlier this year, but I think that the > American administration concluded that peaceful culture change in the > Muslim countries is impossible. There has to be revolution within Saudi > Arabia, Iran, Iraq and other oil-bearing Muslim countries, in order to > split the religion and the state -- similar to Kemal Ataturk's in Turkey in > 1928. (Ominously, there are signs that Turkey itself is now slipping back > into Islam-dominated politics.) > > I'm not excluding the possibility that Americans troops will invade Iraq. > This is quite probable, in fact, given the momentum of Bush's propaganda, > but it will be slow and careful (and probably stop well within the southern > Shia Muslim region), making sure that there will always be sufficient > American troops available on the SA border to support the modernists in SA > if they are necessary.
More killing of old people, women and children. The military solution must become the admittance of the failure of culture. The culture of the aggressor. We are all predators for we must eat one another but civilization is our only hope for salvation from the base nature of our being. I have no problems with admitting the predator, I just don't believe that anyone who is given power deserves being called a human being until they rise above the blunt use of military force to prove their point. We have much too much available to us as alternatives. We now have the ability to answer every fanatic on the planet with genuine information. Suppression is not the answer. Only information. Pay your soldiers to go to school and then work on the internet fighting with words, every single fanatic they can find. Unfortunately we all suffer from the Kudzu and killer bee syndrome. Both the vine and the bee are invaders of our territory that will probably eventually ruin our forests. We refuse to get our hands dirty fighting them but choose instead to simply measure the progress and hope they won't like cold weather. If it can't be cheaply met with the economy of scale we won't do it and there in lies the problem. The battle for hearts and minds must be fought by individuals who are more sophisticated and smarter than the wealthy dilettantes who turn their people into the same kind of fodder that our industrialists would like for them to be. Enough! Ray Evans Harrell
