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Morris Dovey

Tim Daneliuk (in ) said:

| Morris Dovey wrote:
|| Tim Daneliuk (in ) said:
||
||| Morris Dovey wrote:
||||
|||| I understand your desire for retribution for wrongs; as well as
|||| your loathing of evil and your desire to eliminate it. I also
|||| understand that you would impose your own personal notion of
|||| justice (and perhaps your own personal definition of evil) on all
|||| the rest of the world.
|||
||| Not the case, or at least not as you frame it. The only "evil" for
||| which I see redress is that "evil" which causes harm to others.
||| For instance, I think drug abuse is "evil" in that is causes
||| great harm to the individual abusing the drug. But until/unless
||| their drug abuse causes harm to others, I seek no legal (i.e.,
||| forceful) remediation. In the matter of geopolitics, I similarly
||| do not see it as our (the democratic West) job to intervene
||| until/unless the actions of other people or nations jeopardizes
||| that democratic West.
||
|| That's a form of isolationism that I don't think will work.
|
| It worked really well until 1899 when TR decided we needed to stick
| our beak into everyone else's business. It's been downhill ever
| since.
|
|| Interventions are seldom welcome; and we would do well to
|| participate as members of a global community intervention team.
|| Unilateral interventions should only be done as a last ditch
|| desperation effort.
|
| Intervention in the terms I described - when necessary to remediate
| threat against the democratic West - ought never to rarely to be
| a group grope. The nations under threat should act as unilaterally
| as
| they wish. The planet is not some Harvard debating society and
| feeling good about how we're all one happy planet is not the point.

Group grope? I'm not certain what you're trying to imply by that.
Acting unilaterally invites anyone and everyone who might have
objections to retalliate against the nation so acting, either
separately or in concert. The US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq would
have played very differently without the in-theater support of allies.
I would suggest you re-examine the information.

||| The thing that makes the current situation difficult is that the
||| threat is a gathering and growing one with very real potential for
||| global nuclear holocaust. The moral question is analogous to this:
||| If you're in a bar and someone threatens you, just *when* do you
||| have the right to act forcefully? Assuming they have the means to
||| carry out their threat ("threat" is only meaningful if the
||| capacity to deliver the promise exists), do you wait until you've
||| actually been struck by the beer bottle or can you act during the
||| backswing? What is distressing about this entire debate is that
||| the political Right wants to use this as an excuse to "deliver"
||| the enemy into democracy, which clearly does not work. By
||| contrast, the Left seems to want to wait until we're actually
||| bleeding on the bar counter before acting, and in the mean time
||| have some silly nuanced discussion about whether our domestic
||| legal protections ought to be invoked. What is rarely discussed
||| is the dimension of the asymmetric threat in a nuclear world
||| connected by travel, transportation, and techology. In this case,
||| the "beer bottle" once delivered will be devastating.
||
|| Your assessment seems to be unduly pessimistic; which doesn't mean
|| that you're necessarily wrong - but I just don't think the actual
|| threat level is really so high.
|
| I repeat - the threat *today* is not that high. But the threat
| *tomorrow* will be higher than at any time in human history for
| a few simple reasons:
|
| 1) The suicidal eschatology of the Islamic radicals.
|
| 2) Technology, communications, and travel make the planet a
| very small place.
|
| 3) The Islamification of Europe as the existing populations dwindle
| having failed to reproduce effectively. This gives the radicals
| a large land and population base (in the future) from which to
| operate.
|
| Combine those three, and add the availability of a nuclear weapon.
| I repeat: You get the highest threat level known to mankind in all
| of history. Even in the Cold War, the players - who had lots of
| nukes - weren't suicidal maniacs. They wanted to survive. But when
| you have a tribal culture of fairly low sophistication (which
| describes
| a good part of the Islamic world), it's not hard to imagine nuclear
| holocaust in the name of Jihad.
|
||
|| I don't go to bars - in part because I really don't enjoy being
|| around ****faced people who can't control themselves. In the
|| relatively few
|
| Me either. I find drunks repulsive. I don't mind going into a bar,
| I just leave when the stupidity begins.
|
|| real life fights I've been in, I've tried first to avoid a fight
|| altogether, taken the first and only blow from an oponent, and then
|
| We cannot afford to take "the first blow" in the matters before us.
| The first nuclear blow will be fatal because it will trigger
| responses that will just escalate.

We are and will remain vulnerable to that first strike. As I assess
the situation, it'll likely _not_ be a nuclear explosion. In any
scenario, the choice of response will be ours to make.

|| fought berserk. I've never fought to inflict pain - I fight to end
|| the fight as quickly and decisively as possible.
|
||| Like you, I dislike much of what is going on at the moment, but
||| what choice do we realistically have? Do we wait for an
||| apocalyptic culture of suicidal maniacs to be armed to the point
||| that we have no choice but to respond with nuclear weapons? In
||| the real world the choice is not the Sunday School choice of
||| simple Good vs. Bad. It is the choice between Bad and Worse.
||
|| We have a number of choices: We can become culturally aware, learn
|| a bit of world history, and recognize that all peoples have
|| something to
|
| Sorry, I don't buy this kind of multiculturalist sentiment. The only
| thing the tribal savages of the Arab Penninsula and Africa have to
| teach us is that tribalism kills remorselessly and for no particular
| purpose.

My experience was very different. I lived on the Arab Peninsula (Saudi
Arabia, Al Hasa Province, Dhahran and Abqaiq) for a total of ten
years. Along with English and American History I studied Arabic,
French, and Middle Eastern history. I was an inquisitive lad; and
asked questions about everything I could imagine of everyone,
everywhere. I'm not an expert on the middle east; but I can assure you
that you're unbelievably wrong. Your ignorance can be understood. Your
prejudice and slander is shameful.

|| offer. We can be the kind of friend that no one wants to pick a
|| fight
|
| Please explain what reasonable/rational basis UBL and his followers
| had for picking a fight with us? We helped them fight the Soviets
| to get them out of Afghanistan. In the early 20th century, it was
| the
| West that provided the capital and know how to extract the oil
| from their stand that makes their nations so wealthy. It is sheer
| fantasy to believe that we can act in manner so nicely as to
| discourage evil people from acting against us. Evil has to be met
| with extreme prejudice and violence to be quelled. There are no
| counterexamples.

If you're really unaware of any rational basis, then you have a lot of
history to catch up on. I suggest skipping the crusades and fast
forewarding to the start of the twentieth century. If you decide that
you'd like to have an in-depth understanding, you'll need to back up
at least to the time of Moses.

That's a lot of history - and most Americans just aren't much
interested. Yet it set the stage for things that're happening today.
You aren't likely aware; but it was a Persian king who was responsible
for freeing the Judeans from Babylon, for allowing them to return to
Judea, even for encouraging them to build the temple in Jerusalem.
When they bogged down and lost heart, it was another Persian king who
sent a priest/lawgiver who brought with him the beginning of the
Talmud. While this may be of little interest to many Americans, the
Persians were key to the development and survival of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. It is not my place to teach you history; but
if you intend to publicly spout value judgements, you should take the
trouble to know at least a little bit of the story. If you want to
understand them, then you need to understand that they never forgot
their contributions - and now that you have just that much of a
glimmer; I suggest a bit of reflection about how people who /do/ know
the whole history in detail might feel about how things are playing
today.

If you don't manage any more than just the first half of the twentieth
century, you'll have all the rational basis you might care to have.

How closely do you watch the news? Did you notice the types of
aircraft used to bomb Beirut, the UN outpost, and non-belligerent
targets? Are you so naive as to think that the civilians on the ground
hold only the Israeli pilots responsible?

|| with. We can look back at our own recent history and notice that
|| power flowed to us most rapidly when we empowered others; and
|| drained away most rapidly when we attempted to use our power to
|| control others. We can do a lot better job of listening to both
|| friends and adversaries.
|
| You are under the evil spell of the popular culture that says we
| are someone trying to "control others". I don't see it that way.
| Had the Islamic radicals not made war on us, especially on our own
| soil, Bush and his advisors could *never* had made the case to
| invade Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. I don't think most Americans
| of any political persuasion want to "control" any other part of
| the planet. We do, however, want to be left alone.

No, I'm not under any such spell. I've been watching closely since the
beginning of the pre Iraq invasion build-up. Evidence in favor of
controlling the territory far, far outweighs any evidence in favor of
helping the Iraqis have any kind of better life.

I have a personal story involving USAID that strongly reinforces my
conclusion. I had good reason to believe that I could be of help in
restoring some parts of the Iraqi infrastructure on a volunteer basis.
In brief, USAID wasn't interested in helping rebuild Iraqi
infrastructure.

||| The thing that makes this discussion so perverse is that the
||| neo-cons have conflated defense and "bringing stability and
||| democracy to the region". No wonder their critics shake their
||| heads in dismay. But, that said, no matter how lousy the
||| rationale', the general trajectory of stopping the disease before
||| it is an epidemic is a sound one. Given any realistic and
||| possible alternative, I'd support it, but I just don't see one.
||| Lockeian/Jeffersonian Liberty is and always should be our
||| inarguable guiding principle. But, it's not a suicide pact and
||| ugly conditions demand ugly responses.
||
|| There are possible ways of slowing down and ultimately stopping the
|| "disease"; but we'll first need to decide that's what we really
|| want to do...
||
|||| I've seen this before - and don't need more.
|||
||| I understand and share your angst for exactly the same reasons, I
||| suspect. But I find it telling that the relatively minor sins of
||| the West in these matters get magnified out of all proportion but
||| the very real and far more serious abuses of the asymmetric
||| warriors get's only a brief glance in the popular debate. As I've
||| said previously, one of the (many) reasons I've become so
||| completely disaffected with the political Left is that they have
||| utterly failed in their role as the "loyal opposition". Instead of
||| dissecting every small failing of the Bush administration, the US
||| Left should have been acting quietly and diplomatically within the
||| halls of power to steer a course everyone could live with. They
||| haven't. They've taken the stance that *anything* W and his crew
||| does is wrong with hope against hope they can regain majority
||| power. Their political ambition trumps the good of democracy.They
||| are contemptible for this. (N.B. That the neo-cons, however wrong
||| you think they are, have *not* done this. They have taken a
||| position and stuck to it in the face of great political pressure
||| and possible loss of power.) Unfortunately, this means that, at
||| least for now, the neo-cons get it all their way. I find this
||| chilling, but not as chilling as doing nothing while we argue
||| about whether US Code applies to Jamal The Suicide Bomber ...
||
|| The sins of the West are "relatively minor" only to westerners.
|| There are cultural issues at play with no shortage of ignorance and
|| misunderstanding at any side.
|
| Our sins are minor by any objective scale. The human rights abuses
| and generally awful behavior in a good part of the rest of the world
| make our sins vanish into the rounding error. The fact that some
| tribal religious nut wants to magnify them to get people to not
| notice his own murderous behavior does not change this.

Ever see Beirut before the first Israeli bombing? I have - and I
understand why it was called the "Paris of the Mediterranean". It was
a beautiful city, bustling with tourists and business people from all
over the world. Seen it lately? How does it make you feel to know that
your tax dollars provided the foreign aid to purchase the weapons that
did the damage? Not very long ago (a year?) I read that we shipped the
Israelis 25 F-16 fighter planes. Do you have /any/ idea how much death
and destruction can be (or has been) inflicted with that many Vipers?
If you and your family lived in Beirut, how "minor" a sin would you
have considered delivery of that capability into the hands of the
destroyers?

I'd suggest that committing lesser sins than someone else does not
make your sins go away, as you suggest - unless you have some insights
into the nature of sin that everyone else has missed.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto