And I feel that the complete lack of strategy (long or short term) taken by Bush Jr. with regard to North Korea has been an utter and complete failure.
I was initially distraught with Bush's reluctance to engage North Korea in any kind of meaningful dialogue, but their recent actions lead me to believe that Bush was right.
Before I went to Korea, I didn't know how much tension still existed there. Several cross-DMZ firefights, tunnel discoveries, small naval skirmishes, and the commando mini-sub incident really opened my eyes. After hearing Kim Hyun Hee talk, I realized what cold, heartless bastards the North Korean rulers are.
For a while, I almost believed that Kim Dae Chung's "sunshine policy" was working, and they were slowly opening up. But it was all a facade. They tricked Jimmy Carter into the now defunct 1994 agreement.
There is a good essay by George Will that squarely fixes the blame for the current crisis on Clinton and Carter, in their naive view that they were dealing with a rational government.
North Korea is one of only two cold war Marxists states still maintaining their independence and the only one of real strategic importance. North Korea has managed to keep Russia, China and the U.S. from controlling them for close to 50 years by playing the fear and greed of each against the other.
They're independent only in the sense that no foreign power is ruling over them. They're still wholly dependent on us, South Korea, and Japan for food.
The Soviets and Chinese never got too close during the cold war because they couldn't stomach the "cult of personality" surrounding Kim Il Sung, and the obvious dynastic succession of Kim Jong Il that was sure to follow his father's death.
Do the Palestinians think the Israelies lack will? Again, just because their goals seem ridiculous to us doesn't mean that they are simply acting with no underlying plan.
The problem there is the leaders of both sides intend to control entire area, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. I believe a majority of the population on both sides would be satisfied with a division of the land, if the killing could just be stopped. But, unless a realist can gain power on both sides who's willing to compromise, I don't have much hope for a peaceful resolution in my lifetime.
Wasn't it the U.S. that organized the sanctions against North Korea that cause the suffering in the country and now causes them to attempt to become a nuclear threat in order to get some respect from the western world?
No, there aren't sanctions against North Korea. The suffering there is the result of decades of agricultural mismanagement coupled with several years of alternating droughts and flooding. They espoused a philosophy of self-reliance that was always just a facade. Without Soviet and Chinese support during the cold war, North Korea would've collapsed long ago.
Now we're the largest supplier of food to them, followed by South Korea and Japan. However, they're so obsessed with controlling their population they re-bag the rice we donate so it still appears they are self-sufficient.
And by the way, I am American. And by the way, apart from his weakness for women, Clinton was (along with Carter) the most sensible U.S. president in recent history.
Unfortunately, sensibility has little to do with effectiveness as president. That dynamic duo is responsible for the current crisis with North Korea.
I'm no historian, but I remember the coup in Peru, the invasions of [Panama] and Grenada, and the U.S.-sponsored civil war in Nicaragua.
I won't deny we've mettled in plenty of other countries, but imperialism requires control. In no way did we control the outcomes of any of your examples:
In Peru, the CIA had Allende assassinated, and Pinochet took power. The interesting part is, although he committed many human rights abuses, he paved the way for democracy, and was forgiven by the Peruvian people. It was the Europeans who arrested him and attempted to try him.
In Panama, Noriega was initially supported by the CIA, but when he ran afoul and started trafficking drugs, they tried to reign him in. It took a small invasion to arrest him.
Grenada was an entirely legitimate operation. Communist backed guerillas had taken many American medical students hostage, so we liberated them.
We didn't start the Nicaraguan civil war, we just supported the side opposite the communists.
I'm no rabid anti-American. I'm even willing to acknowledge the good that was done by the British Empire. (As a Canadian, I'd be a hypocrite not to). However, denying that the US is an imperial power is, um, "delusional nonsense" of another sort.
To look at history objectively, you must consider the good as well as the bad, I agree. For all their abuses and oppression, most empires throughout history have at least provided law and order, constructed infrastructure in the occupied land, and modernized their territories. But America is not guilty of imperialism in any sense of the word. Please read the essay I linked in my previous post for a much better explanatian than I'm capable of writing.
Since you brought up ensuring compliance to arms controls treaties, isn't the US makeing anti-ballistic missile missiles, despite treaties against that?
We withdrew from the ABM treaty, as is the right of any treaty signatory.
The US shrewdly realized that imperialism need not occur via direct warfare but instead was easier to accomplish via economic means. American imperialism has not occurred via direct military action but instead through the long arm of the American corporate enterprise. I don't particularly need to argue this point; American companies dominate the global economic landscape, and where they don't, the dominant company generally stems from a place where America rebuilt using its own ideology, such as Japan or Germany.
That's patently ridiculous! Nobody's holding a gun to peoples' heads, forcing them to buy American products, eat at McDonalds, or watch Baywatch. People around the world are choosing these things because of some kind of fascination with American pop culture.
You probably didn't read the essay I linked to in my post. It's written much better than I'm capable of, and demonstrates the absurdity of any claims of American imperialism.
But he didn't say. Imperialism is a straw man. Parent is right in that, since Kissinger was Secretary of State, we have empasized capitalism over democracy and human rights in the countries that we are involved with.
But his arguments are the same as the people (falsely) accusing the US of imperialism. I definitely agree we've made a lot of mistakes in our foreign policy (or lack thereof in recent years). We've picked the lesser of two evils in many cases and held our nose while they used our supplied weapons to commit atrocities. But this is one reason I believe we need to try to correct some of those situations, like in Iraq.
The parent post never mentioned becoming a Marxist society, just disarmanent. If this is possible, why wouldn't you want to live there?
You'll also notice I never mentioned Marxism. Utopias don't have to be Marxist, there are plenty of loonies out there who think they can create heaven on Earth.
Disarmed states would cease to be independent states very quickly. There will always be those ready to take advantage of others' weakness.
Clinton never got support from Congress, who said that there was no terrorist threat and accused him of distracting the country from the multimillion dollar Whitewater and Lewinsky/Zippergate investigations. Reading newspaper headlines from 1998 can make you ill in light of 9/11.
No kidding, he should've been tried for treason instead.
You don't know the difference between having plans and excuting them do you?
Actually I do, I was just responding to the parent poster, who implied that the US had military ambitions to conquer the world. That's simply absurd, but it's still entirely plausible that North Korea could get desperate and attck the South.
And what gives US of A the right to tell how other countries work? The right of military power perhaps?
Nothing, but we aren't generally dictating other states' conduct. However, when there's a credible threat to our national security, we have every right to deal with it.
Yes, but rebuilt why? And they most certainly didn't leave Europe (or the rest of the world) to their own devices. Think of NATO, I believe USA has lots of weapons around Europe. And I really doubt USA could've conquered the world by military might, or if it would've been possible the resulting country" would've been so unstable that it would've probably ruined the economy far beyond what WW II did.
Of course it was in our interest to rebuild Europe. No state acts on purely altruistic motives. But the US showed great generosity and even greater restraint, unprecedented in recorded history.
Who could've challenged us militarily? We were just beginning to tap our resources when WW II ended. I agree the resulting empire would've been unstable. Nobody has been able to keep an empire together for too long, not the Romans, Mongols, British, Soviets, or anyone else.
Yes, America is the only "Utopia" allowed to exist clearly, and a Bush America at that.
America is no utopia, and I would never claim it is. Any hopes of achieving some kind of utopia are firmly rooted in fantasy alone. Human nature will ensure that.
And who made you the expert on North Korea? They may still squak about reuniting the peninsula, but N.K. isn't insane, they know the can't invade South Korea. Japan? Don't make me laugh. What makes you think that given their current situation they aren't more concentrated on simple survival? This most recent ploy is an effort to obtain guarantees of their regime's safety.
I won't claim to be an expert on North Korea, but I'm sure I know more than your average/.er: I speak some Korean, was stationed in South Korea for two years in the Air Force, try to keep up with the news from there, and I still have friends there.
I wouldn't be so sure of Kim Jong Il's sanity. Their latest tactics don't seem too likely to lengthen their time in power.
As the others have pointed out, we still have more nukes than russia. (We also have far more nukes in workable condition, in addition to a decisive first strike capability in our nuclear armed submarines, still deployed through out the deep oceans of the world). We signed a treaty not to develop chemical and biological weapons. But we did anyway using a loophole claiming that we were trying to figure out to "fight against" bio-chem weapons. Where do you think the Anthrax used in the post 9/11 mail attacks came from? From our own research programs.
No, Russia still has all 27,000 warheads from the height of the cold war, and we still only have 20,000. Plutonium has a 24,000 year half-life, and uranium is in the millions. Those warheads can be retrofitted to weapons pretty easily.
That loophole was an explicitly intended clause in the treaty, for all parties involved. Unless you're susceptible to conspiracy theories, there's absolutely no reason to believe we've developed new WMDs, and many reasons to believe we're only researching how to combat them.
Sure the anthrax came from our own labs, but most likely as a result of sloppy handling, not malicious intent. Several universities around the country have been supplied with anthrax samples from the government. Hopefully they've woken up to the possible consequences of their lax security and fixed it by now.
Nice bullshit analysis. Al Qaeda (and not Iraq mind you) attacked on 9/11 in an attempt to cause the U.S. to overreact against Afghanistan so OSB could unite the radical elements in the middle east against the U.S., overthrow the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia and gain a strangle hold over the oil vital to the U.S. economy. OSB thought that Al Qaeda could mire the U.S. in a prolonged Vietnam-like war in Afghanistan, as the USSR had been caught in the 80's. Fortunately, the technological advances of the last two decades and the general unpopularity of the Taliban created a different outcome in Afghanistan. Also the 9/11 attack proved to be less "popular" than anticipated.
I don't think Bin Laden had any such grand strategy in mind when the attacks were planned. Ever since they first bombed the WTC in 1993, they kept escalating the attacks. When we didn't retaliate with enough force or resolve, he saw that as weakness. He probably never expected us to actually put our troops in danger, on the ground.
First, the Korean War never officially ended, becuase no peace treaty was signed, only a cease fire. Since the North Koreans have done a pretty good job of messing their own country up, they'll eventually implode or explode. If they explode, the obvious direction will be their neighbors to the south. Second, Koreans, from both the North and the South, don't have much love for the Japanese. They're still a tad bitter about the Japanese occupying Korea from 1910-1945, raping, pillaging, murdering, forcing them to take Japanese names, and prohibiting them from speaking Korean. The rocket North Korea launched a couple years ago went across Japan for a reason.
But when Russia tried to do the same using Cuba as a base, Kennedy almost blew up the whole world by escalating the situation further and further. I find it most amusing how the USA still managed to let this man be known as a hero in the history books.
I agree. Kennedy started the Vietnam war and was a bigger womanizer than even Clinton, but since he was assassinated, he's been lionized in US culture.
And the rebuilding of Germany was done to prevent the Russians from gaining power in Europe.
Sure, that's one reason, every state is going to act in its own interests. Another important reason was the lesson learned from the failure of the Versailles treaty after WW I.
No. See the numbers from the BBC. Those are from 2001; I couldn't find newer numbers. Feel free to post a link to a source with more recent numbers.
That's the point, more recent numbers are irrelevent. Russia and us still have every warhead from the height of the cold war: about 27,000 in Russia and 20,000 here. Plutonium has a 24,000 year half life, and uranium is in the millions. They can be retrofitted to weapons pretty easily.
Funny, that is exactly what Saddam Hussein has saying for years about his biological and chemical weapons.
Except that he has a well known, proven track record of actually using them, on his own people even.
Funny, I thought Bush unilaterally declared that the USA would no longer honour those treaties. Do you have more recent information on this?
We withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. That's how treaties are designed, as agreements between two or more parties, only in effect as long as the parties still agree to the treaty.
I am impressed by the depth of your argument. This should really convince everybody that it's a good idea to spend tax money on weapons of mass destruction instead of feeding the hungry and providing health care to the population.
I never even insinuated we should spend more on WMD. Besides, as a conservative/libertarian, I don't believe it's the government's duty to feed the hungry or provide health care. Granted, I personally believe we should provide a safety net for people for a short time in the case of emergencies.
I'm pissed at a lot of things that the USA is doing these days (steel tarrifs, softwood lumber tarrifs, farm subsidies, patent laws, copyright laws, general world wide bullying, and this wierd lack of unstanding that the rest of the world does NOT want to become a clone of the USA and its particular set of beliefs)
I agree completely about the tariffs, subsidies, and IP laws. Could you imagine if conditions were similar when automobiles were first invented? There would be horse-drawn carriages on the roads still today to protect the jobs of blacksmiths and livery stables.
The European Union is racing to pass us up with the most Byzantine IP laws.
I don't think anyone's interested in cloning the US though, we do have our share of problems. But most of the world has this wierd love-hate relationship with us: in one breath it's "down with America," and in the next they can't get enough McDonalds, Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and Baywatch.
No one in Canada is worried that the USA is going to invade us, but we do wish that they wouldn't ask us to support their wars while waging economic war on us.
Despite our differences, we'll always be the best of friends. It doesn't generate much news, but we share the world's longest undefended border and we have the largest trade relationship by far between any two countries.
US: 7,982 deployed nuclear weapons Russia: About 6000.
The keyword here is deployed. Those are the warheads ready to be launched/dropped right now. During the height of the cold war, the USSR had 27,000 warheads deployed and we had 20,000. But remember, plutonium has a half life of over 24,000 years, and uranium is in the millions. The rest of those warheads are still in storage, and it doesn't take long to retrofit them on weapons.
Bullshit. "How to defend against them" is a euphemism for "how to unleash them with minimal losses on our part".
Right, and the black helicopters are all a just a part of a big government conspiracy too. I have no doubt the US would retaliate with nuclear weapons if weapons of mass destruction were used against us, but no politician or military leader has any desire to unleash chemical, or especially biological, weapons. They're just as likely to affect our own troops as well.
Against civillians, mind you, and the war was already won. Japan had been trying to negociate a surrender with the help of russian diplomats for about a year when the US decided to nuke 'em (twice!). The point was not to end the war, it was to get an unconditionnal surrender...kick 'em while they're down.
Civilians were targeted by all sides in WW II. Fortunately that isn't acceptable today. We go to extraordinary lengths to avoid accidental civilian deaths today, made easier, but much more expensive, with precision guided munitions.
As another poster pointed out, the Japanese were not close to surrendering before the atomic bombs. They even flat out refused to surrender after the first one was dropped.
I don't know about him, but my understanding is like this: You hit them, they hit you back more, you ht THEM back more, they hit YOU back double more...
Round and round it goes...
So, yeah, keep on picking a fight with Irak, and when the extremists hit you back for them, you can say "see, they hit us, we were right to hit them first", again and agin and again.
No, it's more like this:
1993 - WTC bombed, no retaliation
1993 - "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, US forces turn tail and run
1996 - Khobar towers bombed, no retaliation, abandoned more accessible bases in Saudi Arabia for more remote ones
1998 - Bin Laden calls US a "paper tiger" in interview
1998 - Two embassies in Africa bombed, didn't retaliate until it conveniently delayed an impeachment vote
1999 - Terrorists intercepted planning to bomb New Year's Eve celebrations
2000 - USS Cole bombed, no retaliation
2001 - Sept 11
Because we didn't use effective or timely retaliation, they came to believe we were a bunch of spineless cowards. They kept escalating their attacks, culminating in 9/11.
Er, that's the point of the Catholics' ban on birth control, for one. Sex is bad unless (and ONLY unless) it's being engaged in specifically for procreation. And I believe parent was making an unstated assumption of his own there and should have written "sex for pleasure".
But the Roman Catholic church doesn't speak for all Christians, much of the time not even for its own followers.
If the parent poster meant that he should've explicitly stated so, his post was otherwise such a rigorous, detailed, logic proof. (Note sarcasm.)
you forgot that it should be confined to marraige, and only for the purposes of having children, and never for pleasure, marraige or not.
Only according to the Roman Catholic church. Orthodox, Protestant, and other Christians don't necessarily believe the same thing. Even many Catholic lay-people don't agree with their church on many issues, especially this one.
I hope you're kidding, right? Not all conservatives hold the same view. Even the most far-right wing, Christian Coalition, fundamentalist, conservative zealot doesn't believe sex is bad, just that it should be confined to marriage.
For all your philosophical sophistication, trying to disprove the parent comment through your sheer, logical brilliance, you sure are ignorant.
If you think that North Korea (or Iraq) as aspirations to take over the world, then I think you are mistaking them with the most power / money-hungry country on Earth - the US. Everyone else (except for Israel) is quite happy left to their own devices, and only has weapons to protect themselves from the inevidable invasion from the US military / economy.
North Korea may not want to take over the world, but they definitely have plans to invade South Korea and Japan. Their quasi-Marxist, central-planning philosophy of "self-sufficiency" has led to massive famine and economic stagnation. The only reason they have any food to eat is South Korean and US aid.
As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense. We could've ruled the world long ago. After WW II, we were the only real power left on Earth. It would've been easy to establish the first truly global empire and rule the entire planet. Instead, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, then went home. You can find a much more cogent argument here.
If you want to get upset about who has weapons of mass destruction, then have a look at 'our' side. The US has more nuclear, chemical and biological weapons than every other country on earth combined. And they have proved on numerous occasions that they are willing to use them to assert their economic 'rights' (while pretending that they are fighting the 'good fight' for decomcracy).
Are you kidding, or just ignorant? Russia has more nukes than us, and the only biological and chemical weapons we have left are used for training and research only, not research into new weapons mind you, but how to defend against them.
Yes, we are still the only country to use nuclear weapons in war. However, it probably saved the lives of 5 million American and Japanese soldiers who would've died in an invasion, and it ended the war.
When will we see UN, or Iraqi, or North Korean inspectors checking out the US's weapons of mass destruction and shaking their heads and saying 'This is not good enough. These are clear signs or your intent to invade us. We will therefore make a pre-emptive strike!'. Until the US disarms itself (and all countries should), then it has no right to demand other countries disarm themself. If the US insists on hunting down every last terrorist and every last weapon on the 'other side', then it is going to produce more terrorists and more weapons in the act.
First, we actually do allow the UN and Russia to inspect our weapons of mass destruction. They ensure compliance with several arms control treaties.
If you think all countries should disarm, you're incredibly naive. Someone else would always rearm and try to assert their power. This is partly what we're seeing now with Al Qaeda, a non-governmental organization waging war across international borders. As long as there are humans left, there will be war and violence. Your utopia will never exist, and besides, I wouldn't want to live there.
You also have a severe misunderstanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset. The reason they even attempted 9/11 is they thought the US was a "paper tiger." Throughout the 90s they kept escalating their attacks, but Bill Clinton never retaliated quickly or decisively enough. The most he ever did was lob a few cruise missiles at empty training camps and pharmeceutical factories.
I learned engineering skills to make a temporary, stable structure (a 33' geodesic dome).
Did you really learn engineering skills, or did some guy show you how to build a geodesic dome? There is a difference.
Unless you learned how to do a structural analysis of a geodesic dome, or something similar, I'd conjecture that you learned simple construction techniques, not engineering.
Besides, you could've learned how to build a geodesic dome from a number of websites, without even leaving the comfort of your home.
Right, if you want to learn a useless language that's hardly spoken by anyone, anywhere. At least studying an ancient, dead language is useful for studying manuscripts or artifacts.
Do you know if the CIA, FBI and the rest of the spooks are under the defense slice?
The FBI is funded under the DOJ.
The CIA is funded partly overt, and partly secret, spread out under various entities on the budget.
The rest of the spooks are already mostly under DOD, but several federal agencies outside of DOD have their own intelligence functions.
This site has a good summary of who makes up the US intelligence community.
How about the newly created homeland defense dept. I think they should all be lumped under the defense portion of the budget.
As far as Homeland Security goes, I'm not sure where this will fall for budgetary purposes. Since it's mostly an amalgamation of several agencies from different departments, I suppose it'll get its own category, and reduce the share of the other depts.
Regardless, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and service to the national debt together will still dwarf all combined defense spending.
About funding: what about reallocating some of that defence budget which is gobbling about 50% of the total budget?
What??? Defense spending is under 20% of the US federal budget. Here's a good website that explains the whole federal budget, and for the illiterate, and easy to understand pie chart. Those are for the FY 2001 budget, which is a couple years old, so the current budget is also available (as Excel spreadsheet files).
Nothing in the world makes people do more insane and idiotic things, then the belief that their invisible man in the sky is more right and valid then your invisible man in the sky...
What would make people massacre their fellow human beings in large numbers? The bloodiest century in recorded history was the 20th, and most of the massacres were from political regimes that preached atheism as their offical religion.
Martin Niemoller was a pastor in Nazi Germany. That's what the poem is referencing. He initially supported Hitler, but eventually got disillusioned, resisted, and was arrested. After the war, he was one of the people responsible for the German churches admitting partial guilt for the Nazis' atrocities.
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Before I went to Korea, I didn't know how much tension still existed there. Several cross-DMZ firefights, tunnel discoveries, small naval skirmishes, and the commando mini-sub incident really opened my eyes. After hearing Kim Hyun Hee talk, I realized what cold, heartless bastards the North Korean rulers are.
For a while, I almost believed that Kim Dae Chung's "sunshine policy" was working, and they were slowly opening up. But it was all a facade. They tricked Jimmy Carter into the now defunct 1994 agreement.
There is a good essay by George Will that squarely fixes the blame for the current crisis on Clinton and Carter, in their naive view that they were dealing with a rational government.
They're independent only in the sense that no foreign power is ruling over them. They're still wholly dependent on us, South Korea, and Japan for food.
The Soviets and Chinese never got too close during the cold war because they couldn't stomach the "cult of personality" surrounding Kim Il Sung, and the obvious dynastic succession of Kim Jong Il that was sure to follow his father's death.
The problem there is the leaders of both sides intend to control entire area, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. I believe a majority of the population on both sides would be satisfied with a division of the land, if the killing could just be stopped. But, unless a realist can gain power on both sides who's willing to compromise, I don't have much hope for a peaceful resolution in my lifetime.
Now we're the largest supplier of food to them, followed by South Korea and Japan. However, they're so obsessed with controlling their population they re-bag the rice we donate so it still appears they are self-sufficient.
Unfortunately, sensibility has little to do with effectiveness as president. That dynamic duo is responsible for the current crisis with North Korea.
- In Peru, the CIA had Allende assassinated, and Pinochet took power. The interesting part is, although he committed many human rights abuses, he paved the way for democracy, and was forgiven by the Peruvian people. It was the Europeans who arrested him and attempted to try him.
- In Panama, Noriega was initially supported by the CIA, but when he ran afoul and started trafficking drugs, they tried to reign him in. It took a small invasion to arrest him.
- Grenada was an entirely legitimate operation. Communist backed guerillas had taken many American medical students hostage, so we liberated them.
- We didn't start the Nicaraguan civil war, we just supported the side opposite the communists.
To look at history objectively, you must consider the good as well as the bad, I agree. For all their abuses and oppression, most empires throughout history have at least provided law and order, constructed infrastructure in the occupied land, and modernized their territories. But America is not guilty of imperialism in any sense of the word. Please read the essay I linked in my previous post for a much better explanatian than I'm capable of writing.You probably didn't read the essay I linked to in my post. It's written much better than I'm capable of, and demonstrates the absurdity of any claims of American imperialism.
You'll also notice I never mentioned Marxism. Utopias don't have to be Marxist, there are plenty of loonies out there who think they can create heaven on Earth.
Disarmed states would cease to be independent states very quickly. There will always be those ready to take advantage of others' weakness.
No kidding, he should've been tried for treason instead.
Nothing, but we aren't generally dictating other states' conduct. However, when there's a credible threat to our national security, we have every right to deal with it.
Of course it was in our interest to rebuild Europe. No state acts on purely altruistic motives. But the US showed great generosity and even greater restraint, unprecedented in recorded history.
Who could've challenged us militarily? We were just beginning to tap our resources when WW II ended. I agree the resulting empire would've been unstable. Nobody has been able to keep an empire together for too long, not the Romans, Mongols, British, Soviets, or anyone else.
America is no utopia, and I would never claim it is. Any hopes of achieving some kind of utopia are firmly rooted in fantasy alone. Human nature will ensure that.
I wouldn't be so sure of Kim Jong Il's sanity. Their latest tactics don't seem too likely to lengthen their time in power.
No, Russia still has all 27,000 warheads from the height of the cold war, and we still only have 20,000. Plutonium has a 24,000 year half-life, and uranium is in the millions. Those warheads can be retrofitted to weapons pretty easily.
That loophole was an explicitly intended clause in the treaty, for all parties involved. Unless you're susceptible to conspiracy theories, there's absolutely no reason to believe we've developed new WMDs, and many reasons to believe we're only researching how to combat them.
Sure the anthrax came from our own labs, but most likely as a result of sloppy handling, not malicious intent. Several universities around the country have been supplied with anthrax samples from the government. Hopefully they've woken up to the possible consequences of their lax security and fixed it by now.
I don't think Bin Laden had any such grand strategy in mind when the attacks were planned. Ever since they first bombed the WTC in 1993, they kept escalating the attacks. When we didn't retaliate with enough force or resolve, he saw that as weakness. He probably never expected us to actually put our troops in danger, on the ground.
I agree. Kennedy started the Vietnam war and was a bigger womanizer than even Clinton, but since he was assassinated, he's been lionized in US culture.
Sure, that's one reason, every state is going to act in its own interests. Another important reason was the lesson learned from the failure of the Versailles treaty after WW I.
That's the point, more recent numbers are irrelevent. Russia and us still have every warhead from the height of the cold war: about 27,000 in Russia and 20,000 here. Plutonium has a 24,000 year half life, and uranium is in the millions. They can be retrofitted to weapons pretty easily.
Except that he has a well known, proven track record of actually using them, on his own people even.
We withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. That's how treaties are designed, as agreements between two or more parties, only in effect as long as the parties still agree to the treaty.
I never even insinuated we should spend more on WMD. Besides, as a conservative/libertarian, I don't believe it's the government's duty to feed the hungry or provide health care. Granted, I personally believe we should provide a safety net for people for a short time in the case of emergencies.
The European Union is racing to pass us up with the most Byzantine IP laws.
I don't think anyone's interested in cloning the US though, we do have our share of problems. But most of the world has this wierd love-hate relationship with us: in one breath it's "down with America," and in the next they can't get enough McDonalds, Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and Baywatch.
Despite our differences, we'll always be the best of friends. It doesn't generate much news, but we share the world's longest undefended border and we have the largest trade relationship by far between any two countries.
Right, and the black helicopters are all a just a part of a big government conspiracy too. I have no doubt the US would retaliate with nuclear weapons if weapons of mass destruction were used against us, but no politician or military leader has any desire to unleash chemical, or especially biological, weapons. They're just as likely to affect our own troops as well.
Civilians were targeted by all sides in WW II. Fortunately that isn't acceptable today. We go to extraordinary lengths to avoid accidental civilian deaths today, made easier, but much more expensive, with precision guided munitions.
As another poster pointed out, the Japanese were not close to surrendering before the atomic bombs. They even flat out refused to surrender after the first one was dropped.
No, it's more like this:
- 1993 - WTC bombed, no retaliation
- 1993 - "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, US forces turn tail and run
- 1996 - Khobar towers bombed, no retaliation, abandoned more accessible bases in Saudi Arabia for more remote ones
- 1998 - Bin Laden calls US a "paper tiger" in interview
- 1998 - Two embassies in Africa bombed, didn't retaliate until it conveniently delayed an impeachment vote
- 1999 - Terrorists intercepted planning to bomb New Year's Eve celebrations
- 2000 - USS Cole bombed, no retaliation
- 2001 - Sept 11
Because we didn't use effective or timely retaliation, they came to believe we were a bunch of spineless cowards. They kept escalating their attacks, culminating in 9/11.If the parent poster meant that he should've explicitly stated so, his post was otherwise such a rigorous, detailed, logic proof. (Note sarcasm.)
For all your philosophical sophistication, trying to disprove the parent comment through your sheer, logical brilliance, you sure are ignorant.
As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense. We could've ruled the world long ago. After WW II, we were the only real power left on Earth. It would've been easy to establish the first truly global empire and rule the entire planet. Instead, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, then went home. You can find a much more cogent argument here.
Are you kidding, or just ignorant? Russia has more nukes than us, and the only biological and chemical weapons we have left are used for training and research only, not research into new weapons mind you, but how to defend against them.
Yes, we are still the only country to use nuclear weapons in war. However, it probably saved the lives of 5 million American and Japanese soldiers who would've died in an invasion, and it ended the war.
First, we actually do allow the UN and Russia to inspect our weapons of mass destruction. They ensure compliance with several arms control treaties.
If you think all countries should disarm, you're incredibly naive. Someone else would always rearm and try to assert their power. This is partly what we're seeing now with Al Qaeda, a non-governmental organization waging war across international borders. As long as there are humans left, there will be war and violence. Your utopia will never exist, and besides, I wouldn't want to live there.
You also have a severe misunderstanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset. The reason they even attempted 9/11 is they thought the US was a "paper tiger." Throughout the 90s they kept escalating their attacks, but Bill Clinton never retaliated quickly or decisively enough. The most he ever did was lob a few cruise missiles at empty training camps and pharmeceutical factories.
Unless you learned how to do a structural analysis of a geodesic dome, or something similar, I'd conjecture that you learned simple construction techniques, not engineering.
Besides, you could've learned how to build a geodesic dome from a number of websites, without even leaving the comfort of your home.
Right, if you want to learn a useless language that's hardly spoken by anyone, anywhere. At least studying an ancient, dead language is useful for studying manuscripts or artifacts.
In all seriousness, here's an excellent essay on this topic written recently.
The CIA is funded partly overt, and partly secret, spread out under various entities on the budget.
The rest of the spooks are already mostly under DOD, but several federal agencies outside of DOD have their own intelligence functions.
This site has a good summary of who makes up the US intelligence community.
As far as Homeland Security goes, I'm not sure where this will fall for budgetary purposes. Since it's mostly an amalgamation of several agencies from different departments, I suppose it'll get its own category, and reduce the share of the other depts.
Regardless, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and service to the national debt together will still dwarf all combined defense spending.
A lot of very intelligent people have been religious.
Martin Niemoller was a pastor in Nazi Germany. That's what the poem is referencing. He initially supported Hitler, but eventually got disillusioned, resisted, and was arrested. After the war, he was one of the people responsible for the German churches admitting partial guilt for the Nazis' atrocities.
A quick Google search turned up this short bio.