Brandioch, you have a point, from a Western left-liberal point of view.

Keep in mind the result in '92: GHWB told Schwarzkopf to stop before our troops even fully eliminated the Iraqi army, much less threatened Baghdad......

If what it's going to turn into is "give me money or I'll kill you", Bush & Co. will just go ::shrug:: at it.

So will a lot of the people I hang out with.

We're 'way better at it than they are, and we've got all those wonderful toys, and we know from the above example -- and dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller ones -- that the only result of giving in is louder cries of "More! More!" Americans do not have a monopoly on greed and selfishness.

Yes, we've got a lot of people around the world who are living on $1 a day or less, sometimes a lot less.

If we spent the same proportion on weapons as Iraq does, we'd have squadrons of M1A1s at every podunk armory and airplanes like swarms of bees. We don't. We spend a lot of money on luxuries, instead, and fund the weapons out of what is almost literally pocket change compared to the size of our economy.

Which is what doomed the Russians, and is gonna doom just about anybody else for the next couple decades (after that, no predictions -- too chaotic).

You get an Iraqi or North Korean choice: spend the money on weapons, and you don't have anything for an economy back home. Meanwhile the US can double its expenditures in a heartbeat; for instance, if they convinced all the suburbanites to give up their SUVs for the military effort, like pots and pans in WWII.

In a lesser way, it happens closer to home. Mexico has more business jets than the US did before the explosion of "fractional ownership" early this year and its growth after 9/11 -- not more per capita, more in absolute terms.

What we pay Mexico for what we buy there would make a nice, lower-middle-class income for just about everybody, but it doesn't get there. It goes to the caudillos and patrons, and the peons eat dirt. Most of the world outside Western Europe does it the same way.

The irony there is that your viewpoint was gaining strength pre 9/11.

We were starting to talk about, and admit, some of the things that had been done over the years when we were contesting with the Soviet Union using proxies.

Much of that was, in retrospect, pretty damn foul -- but a lot of the angst is rewriting of history by ignoring things that were in the forefront of people's minds at the time.

Do you really think we'd even be discussing this sort of thing in a Stalinist Empire headquartered from Moscow?

...which is precisely what those folks were after, and if you don't believe it, go check out the files from the NKVD and KGB that recently became public.

Poor people around the world deserve our help, and part of that involves reducing our consumption.

You ain't gonna find many of us willing to do it at gunpoint, when we're so damn good at pointing guns back.

Oh, OK, we're coming from that direction. Well enough. I got distracted by the version of the argument that basically says, "Well, let's pay them off."

Which is what the "let's help the poor folks so they'll love us" notion basically comes to in the end.

Realistically, India isn't a "poor" country from my point of view.

India and industrial Pakistan are what I'd call "medium wealth".

Yeah, that's a nice paranoid scenario, all too possible. Probable? I don't think so. A million wouldn't do it, but of course that's irrelevant; he can probably scare up the cash, granted.

Where we disagree is on whether Osama [taken as an avatar for thousands of people with similar ideas] is likely to reach that conclusion.

Do you suppose these forums are all there are? Or even very notable?

I was talking about the general society, the jingoistic Joe Sixpack types. The issues were starting to be discussed around the coffee shops and redneck bars here -- pre 9/11.

Brandioch, this is an example of the kind of thing that gets people fuming at you. Are you being deliberately obtuse here? The subject of the second sentence, which I rather dramatically introduced with the double dash, is "Stalinist Empire".

And, actually, you missed the point of the first sentence... which was addressing the stuff we did in the Fifties and Sixties. Much of it was nasty. Much of it was necessary. The jury is still out on how much the two sets intersect.

Something I'm truly astonished to see that you realize.

Hard question. I don't think there's an answer, or that one is needed -- I don't think the man (or his group) has the resources. Furthermore, I don't think they could deliver the goods.

We have no leverage on ObL himself; the only leverage we have is on the people who sponsor him, which is what the President has been saying from the beginning of this episode. What we have to do is work with the leverage we have. I hope the Sons of Ibn Saud have the same opinion of nuking the U.S., and what would happen afterward, that I do.

A million would not buy the facilities to make a bomb. I don't think a million would buy a bomb that was already built (e.g., one of the Russian ones) and I'm almost certain a million wouldn't buy a bomb that worked. Nuclear weapons require maintenance.

Yep, and the people you know are all that count, right?

Until and unless issues start getting talked about in rural coffee shops and cowboy bars, and their equivalents in Iowa and Upper Michigan, nothing will get anywhere.

Unless, of course, you insist that you and the rest of the nobility can make the decisions without input from the hoi polloi.

No, emotions aren't logical. Neither is refusal, on your part, to attempt to deal with such rhetorical devices as digression and return, argument by example, and metaphor and simile.

In this case your emotions betrayed you -- you saw a chance for a zingy one-liner against the jingoistic boob, leaped on it, and failed to notice that what attracted you was actually a setup for something quite different.

To take an example: we flatly bullied Cuba into pushing the missiles out.

The point I'm trying to make is that sometimes all the choices are unpalatable.

When that happens, we (or anyone) make the choice that seems least unpalatable -- the lesser of the evils.

Second-guessing judgement calls, from the safety and comfort of fifty years and a warm house, is not only stupid, it's stupidly useless.

George Bush (and I) propose a method for handling the situation on the ground now.

How would you address Mr. Atcheson on the subject [contemporary references only, please]

What would have been the effect of having Iran as the southernmost Republic of the Soviet Union? Can you suggest another method of preventing that?

What would a more sensible setup have looked like?

--Again to the British: When India was partitioned into "India" and "Pakistan", were those the correct boundaries?

Suggest a set of arguments that would have made sense to my father for not exploiting that resource [my father was a Sergeant in WWII, in the Pacific theater]. You may not use the word "nuclear" unless you have a complete and definitive solution to the waste problem.

Nobody needs to "acquire" the knowledge -- it's general science; that genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

The technology is and will remain harder.

Illegal immigrants tend strongly to cross the border with what they can carry and little more, and die of it; you should meet some.

Smuggling, especially of good-sized objects, is harder than it looks.

I'm actually less worried about smuggled nukes than I am about North Korean missiles. Do you ever do any international shipping?

Where you and I differ, I think, is that I come from a culture where religious motivations were and are important. I don't think you do; I think you interpret the whole thing in economic and "liberation" terms, and I think you make a very, very serious fundamental mistake in doing so.

The clerics leading the charges are not making economic arguments, and are not interested in liberating their people -- quite the contrary, and they make that explicit; do you know what the word "Islam" means?

You and Ashton are so focused on the [oil], and your leftist interpretation of the oil issue in terms of oppressed peoples of the world, that you seem sometimes not even to have the concepts for what I'm talking about.

The oil is secondary.

We -- the United States -- could do without the oil without missing it much.

Leftist concepts of "oppression", "liberation", "capitalist hegemony", etc. are irrelevant.

The Taliban took a country that was about as oppressed by world capitalism as a country could be -- and smashed what little was available to the people, doing their best to return them to the brutality and ignorance of twelfth-century life.

And don't go all Rousseauvian on me. I'm not impressed by safe, warm, well-fed intellectuals rhapsodizing on the Nobility of infanticide, lice, and starvation.

Oh, I understood well enough from the beginning. I simply think you're looking at it from too simplistic a perspective, as well has having Leftist concepts so firmly embedded that you can't think clearly on the subject.

George Bush, Texas Cowboy, shooting from the hip because he can't think of a way to handle the subject sensibly, just fits really nicely with your preconceptions, doesn't it?

Wrong, n. == The United States of America did it.
Wrong, v.t. == What the United States does to people.
Wrong, v.i. == What the United States does.

Nice to deal in such simplicity, isn't it?