On Monday 17 September 2001 11:25, burns wrote:
| And Sadam is still in power, refuses to adopt a peaceful posture
| toward his neighbours and is still a significant threat.
wait a few days.
| Many people in Iran don't like that regime either. None of these
| countries are open democracies as we are used to in the west... but
| then they are different cultures. The point is that there is
| significant dissent everywhere in that region, with the possible
| exception of Jordan.
first, the situation in iran is a lot more complicated than can be
easily summarized (which is true of saudia, egypt, and jordan, among
others, as well). the irani president, mohammed khatami, is actually
pretty reasonable by the standards we apply to the region. he
actually conceives of a good relationship with the west. the
theocracy there, the mullahs, are as crazed in the shiite direction
as the taliban are sunna. in the instant case, and for *our*
immediate purposes, this doesn't much matter -- iran was universally
troubled by the death of ahmad shah masood last week, and refuses to
recognize the taliban. they of course also hate saddam's regime. but
there is not actually much dissent in iran, though useful fallout of
all that is about to transpire could be the, um, isolation of much of
the theocracy in iran.
meanwhile, there *is* tremendous dissent and trouble elsewhere, in
places you would not necessarily expect. both jordan and kuwait have
significant palestinian problems. the natives have contempt for them
(actually, in arab countries there is pretty vigorous contempt for
pretty much everybody who is not an arab), and could give a toot
about a palestinian homeland but for the fact that it would then
allow them to kick the palestinians out of their own respective
countries. (indeed, arafat is himself handcuffed a little bit,
because any agreement in which israelis don't line up to be shot
cannot be accepted by arafat, because arafat's people would then
shoot him.) kuwait has withdrawn tremendously from its
westernization; i was in the office of a member of the royal family
once and listened to him bitch, as we shared very good scotch, about
the inability to get a drink on kuwait airways, "but if you bring
your own, they don't say anything and will bring you ice." (well, if
you're a member of the royal family, maybe, but not me; though i was
chastised for failing to bring in a case of something good when i
arrived.) this is no longer the case. their big shakeup last year
changed all that. this was not due directly to internal pressure, but
instead complaints from other countries who argued that the kuwaitis
were being a little *too* flamboyant.
saudia has a problem, because the religious cuckoos have taken hold,
and if things continue as they are heading we can pretty much expect
the saudi royal family to move permanently to the beverly hills
hotel, which they own. you have not lived until you've seen a truly
wealthy desert saudi. they come to town in armored mercedes, in
convoys of them, the big cheese surrounded by his robed, heavily
armed band, ululating when they enter or leave buildings, driving
around the block a few times honking, and occasionally firing into
the air. (the closest we have to this is rap "musicians" and their
entourages.) i was saved from a very bad time once when i got yanked
by a friend off a hotel escalator when such a group was coming
through -- i'd nearly bumped into a big guy, and i guarantee you i
did not know the protocol of apology if i had. anyway, these guys
tend to give support to the likes of bin laden, for all sorts of
reasons.
egypt has a big problem, and has for a long time. we can lay some of
this to the soviet influence, but whatever its genesis, mubarak is
kind of screwed. sadat was a far stronger leader, and look what
happened to him. (i've forgotten huge quantities of nasser stuff, and
while some of it is pertinent, not enough to let its lack kill the
point.) you'll note that a lot of the bad guys this time round
carried egyptian passports. this is not a matter of convenience, and
they were not phony. these were egyptians, drawn from the same crowd
that shot up the tourists a few years ago.
a little surprise, to me, was the fact that some of the bad guys
carried passports from the emirates. uae has a lot of money and has
in some respects been the most westernized of the arab countries. i'm
assured by friends, though, that there has been a growing number of
islamonsters there, too -- i guess their equivalent of our tree
huggers.
lebanon -- or, to the brits, the lebanon -- is just a mess, because
its terrorist organizations are multifaceted, not unlike the irish
republican army, which has its purportedly respectable side. i was
amused by bug-eyed walid jumblatt, who last week said that the
attacks in the u.s. were internal affairs, carried out by the
well-known cia agent usama bin laden. the place is cut up like a
blade of grass in a power mower. there are christian sectors and
there are moslem sectors, which in turn are the site of constant
tensions between the sunna and the shia, with enough palestinian
influence to make sure there's always trouble -- not unlike this
weekend, when the talk radio shows were filled with pissed-off
indians arguing that the attacks last week should prove that it's
okay for india to nuke pakistan. (a position, i admit, not entirely
without its charms.)
it gets weirder, much weirder. the russians have an islamonster
problem. so do the chinese, who will probably expend lots of that
which they have lots of -- human lives -- in putting it down once and
for all.
| So, your answer to murder is to stay out of the murderers sight and
| not do anything to attract their attention? A bit simplistic
| perhaps, but you normal people don't go out and muder 5,000 people
| becuase you disagree with their approach to religion, politics or
| economics.
poor roger has gotten slammed unfairly, beginning with me, loudly. he
was doing the devil's advocate thing here, for argument's sake. that
having been said, the solution is way complicated:
-- kill the bad guys. problem is, this violates the sovereignty of
more than a dozen countries, which means that among other things
we'll all walk to work (see tree huggers, above).
-- we tell the nations harboring terrorists that they have to kill
the bad guys or we will and, recognizing their unwillingness to do
so, them, too. problem is, this is simply asking those rulers to
decide whether they'd rather be killed by their own people or by us.
(this is especially true of syria, which knows all too well that they
have nothing and do nothing that anybody needs or even wants; they
are in a miserable location and pretty much everybody is pretty much
pissed off at them pretty much all the time -- in short, if we
flattened the place, nobody would care.)
-- we tell the countries harboring terrorists that they have to kill
the bad guys, and we'll support them if as a result the locals want
to overthrow them. or we'll kill the bad guys.
all while trying to keep a whole bunch of nations in line -- for
appearance, because britain and to some extent australia are the only
allies on which we can really count. indeed, much of the discussion
underway right now has to do with whose support we really want and
whose support we can live without. additionally, we're doing other
things -- the news that bin laden did a big short sell based on the
attacks is a piece of that. it is the piece that is being made
public, because it demonstrates something especially ugly. but
there's a big money spigot turn off underway. that's only a little
part of it. there are very complicated puzzles here -- the
pakistanian situation is a dandy example -- and it will take a
careful hand to solve them just right. and that's before we get into
issues of justice, which require that the taliban and their shia
equivalents get hung up by the thumbs and left in the sun to dry.
whether we wish to dispense justice is debatable, but if we don't,
these bozos will be back at us over and over again.
| I think what you are proposing is to cower in your home just in
| case, by going out after dark, you might attract a bully, a thief,
| a murderer, or a rapist. And if you do, well, then it was your
| fault and you should apologize. I don't mean this personally, but
| people with ideas such as that deserve to be subjegated by
| terrorism and are a threat to their own freedom and that of their
| neighbours. BTW, Canada lost about 100 of our citizens in that
| attack and we have done nothing to Saudia Arabia, Islam, or,
| unfortunately, Usama bin Laden.
sure you did. you existed. you lived relatively happy, relatively
free lives. how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen
the big city? one of the reasons the soviet bloc fell was -- western
television. the desire to get the break they deserve today at
mcdonald's caused a lot of east berliners to want to knock down that
wall. cool americans in their cool faded levis were a lot niftier to
generations of russians than were one-size-fits-all tractor factory
suits. corvettes with busty blondes beat the hell out of boxy and
unreliable cars that you had no chance of owning anyway. we were and
are the dream on the other side. and if it cannot be easily achieved,
well, by allah, it can be destroyed! and therein lies the problem
here: you may remember the james bond movie in which auric goldfinger
was asked by james bond, strapped to the block of steel, the laser
approaching his goodies, what goldfinger wants bond to do. "why, mr.
bond, i want you to die." that is what our enemy wants us to do. if
we want to throw it some money first, or to educate us so that it
will know more about us and therefore make its task easier, why,
sure, glad to have it. but their first and last goal is our
eradication, along with everything for which we stand. our offense is
our existence. there is no negotiating with that, because there is
nothing to negotiate.
now. we can plan on writing off a few tens of thousands of our people
every so often as part of the cost of doing business, or we can do
something about it. reason suggests the latter. but what? after a
generation of trying everything else (actually, close to a thousand
years, but we've been inconveniently located for much of that time),
we've finally hit on the most obvious solution -- making it clear
that the choices are leaving us alone or getting eradicated. as to
the latter, we surely have the power to bring it about in an half
hour's time, but as reasonable people we do not care to kill everyone
in each of more than a dozen countries. we will not do this, not yet.
what is being decided is the minimum number of people we need to kill
-- and how many of our own sons and daughters we are willing to lose
in an unappreciated attempt to avoid killing more people than we
must.
--
dep
There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the
People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.
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