Edmund Storms wrote:
Jed, you are proposing we treat the Moslem countries exactly how we treated Germany after WWI. The plan was make them pay for what they did during WWI and make them too poor to ever do it again.
I do not propose to take anything away from them! Just stop giving them billions of dollars. They have billions in the bank already. If they are smart and resourceful they can avoid a crisis. If they are not, that is their problem, not ours. They will have no money or skills to develop an army the way Germany did after World War I.
Actually, people everywhere *are* smart and resourceful. You just have to give them a sane society and the chance to live decently and they always will. It is a sure thing that all those disgruntled engineers who are presently lining up to kill themselves by crashing airplanes into us would be happy and fulfilled if they were given the challenge to rebuild their society the way Japanese engineers did after 1945. What they want is more work and more challenge, not less.
Put them in charge of a cold fusion desalination megaproject to transform the region they will never again contemplate suicide!
We could cut our consumption in half tomorrow, but it would take some years to cut it back by a factor of 10. While we are doing that the Saudis and others can take responsible steps to develop industry and fix their economy.
On the other hand, after WWII we gave a great deal of money to Japan and to Germany, which helped them become prosperous.
Actually, we took money out of Japan. They were not covered by the Marshall plan. They received no industrial assistance, apart from the use of a few US troop carriers to return overseas Japanese people stranded by the war. Although we did ship emergency food rations into Japan, we also charged them every year for "occupation expenses," and most years the latter outweighed US food contributions. This was the largest single item on the Japanese government budget. (A lot of that money went to Japanese citizens who are working for the Americans.) See: Cohn, "Remaking Japan"
We did not contribute anything to their economy until the Korean War began, when the U.S. Army began making local purchases. This spurred the biggest economic boom in Japanese history up until then.
But that hardly mattered. The big picture was, we brought democracy and stability, and we closed down the weapons manufacturing business and the military and the fascists who were strangling the nation. This gave the people some economic breathing room. When you give any group of people a reasonably peaceful, fair, orderly society to live in and they will always do fine.
Middle Eastern societies would be much more peaceful and fair without oil money flooding through, and corrupting everything it touches, and enriching only a handful. A few years after the bane of oil is lifted, they will be far better off, if they choose to be.
As a result, we have had no more problems. Also, how do you plan to deny terrorists money without making the entire region poor and pissed off?
If the region is poor the terrorists will get no money. There are any number of criminals and terrorists in sub-Saharan Africa, but they are so poor they never leave those countries or bother us except with Advance Fee 914 Fraud.
- Jed
