Most of this boils down to difference of opinion. We aren't going to agree on most of this.

Just a few points, rather peripheral.

A million would definately do it. It would get a hundred of his people into the schools they need to be in. They'd learn and come back to him.

A million would buy the knowledge, true. Of course, that's already been spent several times over; I worked for a Pakistani in college -- at a cyclotron facility. In 1967.

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.

> I don't think ObL ever will do that. Simply because he's still fighting the old wars. He's caught up with the concept of individual martyrs.

Now, the NEXT one just might catch onto the fact that Allah's holy fire will cleanse the infidels.

But that doesn't matter either. Time is what matters. Eventually, ONE of them will figure it out.
>
> We've got breathing room right now. We need to use it.

Interesting thought with some truth in it -- I disagree, but agree that the point is arguable. So what do you suggest?

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.

Whatever. I'm aware. People I know are aware. Then you have the Marlowes of the world.

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.

Let me explain something to you. I don't give a fuck about your emotional state. As I've explained in the past, emotions aren't logical. Emotions are used to manipulate people. Read Stuart Chase. We're getting back into filters and such. The words I use trigger mental images in your mind and you react to those images. That is filtering.

Now, as for your "Stalinist Empire". Well, seeing as how we are not currently under such a regime.....

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. (Technically what follows is a "digression". Normally one reads the digression, then sees if the author brings the subject back to the point, perhaps using the digression as an example or metaphor. You might try it once.)

We aren't currently subjected to a Stalinist Empire. Part of the reason for that is that for roughly forty-five years, we fought back against attempts to establish one. Those attempts included a few military adventures, but were more often what might be called "propaganda" and "proxy" conflicts. Some of the things we did in that effort don't look very nice in retrospect, BUT it's at least arguable that if we hadn't done those things the Stalinist Empire might have worked. To take an example: we flatly bullied Cuba into pushing the missiles out. I think the ensuing embargo can legitimately be argued against, though I'd be arguing in favor -- but are you prepared to argue that we should not have forced 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. That's a judgement call. 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. You don't like it. That's your privilege. But what do you suggest?

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.

Specifics?

Ah. OK, a few examples:

--We supported the French against Ho Chi Minh in the late Forties and early Fifties. That was arguably a mistake. How would you address Mr. Atcheson on the subject [contemporary references only, please]

--During the same time period, the Soviet Union had a sizeable and moderately successful propaganda effort going on in Iran, and the (avowed) Communist Party of Iran looked like winning the election. We stepped in and set up the Pah-Levi Dynasty as rulers of Iran. Arguably this was an error. 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?

--Most of the current borders in the Middle East, and the rulers of the "nations" thereof, were set up by the British after WWII; all we did is rubber-stamp the notions. What would a more sensible setup have looked like? How would you have argued with Mr. Churchill over it? When the British were disengaging, what could we have done to change things for the better? What is the definition of "better" in that sentence?

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

--Oil was discovered in the Middle East in the Twenties and Thirties, between the world wars. British (BP) and American (Amoco) oil companies were involved, as well as European ones (Shell). The oil fields are incredibly rich, and the oil is easy to extract and refine. 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.

--And of course I could fill two or three posts with variants on the Israeli question.

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.

That's where we differ. I think he has the money to acquire the knowledge and technology. If not him, then another like him. As for delivery, that's the easiest part of the equation. NYC by ship. LA, just like the illegal immigrants. DC would be by van with the bomb delivered through Mexico.

Nobody needs to "acquire" the knowledge -- it's general science; that genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Note Clancy's afterword to The Sum of All Fears; he obfuscated the technology, "to salve [his] conscience, not in any reasonable expectation that it matters a damn."

The technology is and will remain harder. Contrary to some belief, nuclear weapons are not made in garages, and won't be for the near future. It is possible to foresee a future of computer-powered machine tools and Star-Trek "replicators", in which nuclear weapons are readily available. That future is not now. What is, now, is the remnants of the Soviet Union stinking and leaking radiation over a quarter of the world.

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?

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.

Hmmm, you should read some of Marlowe's posts about how the average people over there hate us.

I do. He gets it both right and wrong sometimes; what else?

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. ObL and a few of the other more sophisticated Islamists use those terms in talking to the West, but when speaking to their own people the rhetoric is quite different -- and many of the less sophisticated ones don't bother, or don't know how, to obfuscate the issue on those terms. 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.

> But the rest of your post is fairly accurate. We'd be nuking their capitals.
>
> Now, do you understand my reference to gun-slinging?

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? Therefore Louis L'Amour metaphors. It Ain't That Simple^TM

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?