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addict
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I heard a news story this morning about Congress voting against a motion to allow the President to use "any means he thinks fit" against the terrorists. Can any one provide more information on exactly what was asked for by whom and what the outcome was? It was only a quick news clip and I may have misunderstood. If true, it would seem that Congress wishes to keep some control to itself.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Carpal Tunnel
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mav,
this was certainly a nicely reasoned approach, but is it the one we're all looking for?
I think it breaks down at point 4, It is clear to me that an imperative of dealing with terrorists is to detach them from their support base., if bin Laden is truly our target. In all liklihood the Taliban will not give him up, they being of like mind (having expelled the Russian devil). which would leave us exactly where in terms of the rule of law?
also, I think you have slipped into rhetoric which will not win friends and influence people with this statement: That is why it is vital that we do not allow idiots to brand this as a “war”... {emphasis added}
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Carpal Tunnel
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mav, there is much thoughtful in what you've said (indeed much that I agree with), to which I will respond later. But one point I simply must correct, promptly:
The fact is that for more than five decades, in defiance of ... international law, the Palestinians' land has been occupied and their rights ignored by Israel ...
Mav, that is not a "fact"; it is the opinion of the author you quote, and it is highly debatable.*
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*Indeed, the author's blunt claim of "ignored", with absolutely no qualification or exception, ought to indicate that he is -- at best -- oversimplifying and overgeneralizing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Yes, you are right tsuwm - that was a lapse of judgment, and I apologise if anyone was offended by that phrase. And Ken, yes, I was simply quoting the article for interest fo another perspective - I don't neccesarily agree with every nuance either. Though it is a fact that Israel has occupied territory and held it by force of arms in contravention of UN resolution (and yes, I too have reservations about the effectiveness fo the UN, but...)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Does anyone have a photo of New York skyline before the attack (with the towers) and then a picture of the skyline now to add to Max's gallery?
An absolutely uncanny pair of photos, each with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground, appear in:
before: People Magazine (issue dated 9/24), page 1; and
after: Time Magazine (special issue), rear cover
If anyone can find url's, let me know by PM and I will post them here, via edit.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Mav:
I will admit that I was offended by your argumentum ad hominem (rant, nonsense), but I'll try to put aside my personal feelings in search of greater things - namely a civil dialog.
Let's start with your description of us as a trade empire. Certainly we trade throughout the world, to the point where we have huge trade deficits with just about everyone. We buy a whole lot more than we sell, and we have the dollar outflow to prove it. So we're a trade empire, huh? The rest of the world is getting richer at our expense. Those evil Americans! They MAKE us sell things to them while we don't buy anywhere near as much from them. How horrible. Let's punish them for that.
The problem is there's only 275 million of us as opposed to close to 6 billion in the rest of the world. So that means every dollar of mine that flows out of the country gets divided up about 21 ways. Certainly the poor people aren't getting rich fast enough. But I'm spending as fast as I can!!! I will, however, point out that I am now going to be much less likely to spend money on goods produced overseas, particularly from those countries who do not actively join in the battle of eradicating terrorism.
You also said in connection with our being a trade empire "national self interest is pursued with largely ruthless self absorption". As Samuel Adams said disparagingly of you Brits 225 years ago, we are a nation of shopkeepers. But we are damned good at it. Our government does not engage in trade. Our government doesn't have huge tariffs that restrict trade, though we do have some internal price supports which amount to tariffs. Those will probably go away in the next decade or so, I suspect. But the bottom line is that we as individuals (in which respect I include corporations as legal entities) are engaging in free trade wherever we can, just as the shopkeepers in the British Isles do and did. Where individuals can be accused of morality or immorality, the same cannot be said of corporations, which are by their vary nature amoral. They exist for one reason only: to reward their investors. Though corporations have broken and will continue to break laws, in the midterm and long run it is against their basic interests to do so. Here they can be fined, broken into pieces, put out of business. In some overseas areas, they can be nationalized (remember what happened in Cuba after the "revolution"), the corporate equivalent of capital punishment.
It is not national self interest that drives our "trade empire". It is individual self interest, manifested in the proliferation of multinational corporations that at times rival the powers of the governments whereunder they operate. But the government of the United States has a policy not to interfere in the world market place. We are not a trade empire, rather we are a nation of traders.
Yesterday our Federal Reserve System announced that it was going to pump $50 million* into Europe to prop up the national banks there. Did we have to do that? Nope. We could use that money at home right now, but we see as our moral obligation the duty to keep Europe from falling on its ass. And on top of that I'm sending my tax dollars around the world as foreign aid. Because I have to? Nope. You live in the UK. How much of the money we sent the UK to pay for WW II got repaid? How often have we dunned you for it? The answers, as you well know, are none and never. We GAVE the world that money, though we called the donations loans because governments don't like to accept welfare. What about the Marshall Plan? Did we HAVE to rebuild Europe after WW II? Nope. We could have turned our backs on the rest of the world, but we didn't. We gave a helping hand (certainly because it would in the long run help us contain communism, despite the efforts of some of the UK's finest citizens, Kim Philby coming to mind immediately, to help the USSR destroy us.) Did we HAVE to? Nope.
Certainly the US has made mistakes. Show me a country that hasn't. We certainly could have done a better job in Vietnam, where we won the war militarily and lost politically. But we were there because our national leadership thought rightly or wrongly that doing so would contain communism and spread the growth of republican democracy. And as Americans, we expressed openly and publicly a wide range of views on the war in Vietnam, with the result finally that we got out. It was a lost cause from the very beginning because the people we were supporting neither had the will of THEIR people behind them nor were they worthy of supporting.
You also disparage my statement that those who fuck with us do so at their own peril because "the bitter truth is the guys who do this kind of act don't care." Mav, I am not stupid. I know they don't care. They value nothing in life and they value nothing about life. Accordingly, their nihilism is a direct threat to the entire world. They operate not from a political agenda but from an agenda of hate. These United States and the capitalists they represent are the evil Satan, and they feel duty- and honor-bound to destroy us once and for all. Along the way they want to forcibly convert the rest of the world to their twisted religious ideas. I do not want my daughter to live in a world where she is nothing more than an organ of masturbation for the man who owns her, covered from head to toe in a black garment to keep other men from looking at her, and treated as chattel property. Believe it or not, a father in Saudi Arabia can wrap his daughter in chains and drop her into the swimming pool in his back yard, free from any liability for such a heinous act. He can wall her in and feed her dog food until she dies insane.
No, they do not care about us. And in return I care nothing for their continued existence. There are only two ways to be safe from terrorism: give in to them and fight them tooth and nail until we prevail. I will not give in to them. Rather I will not suffer them to live. As Tolkien wrote, "branch and twig, twig and branch, root them out." These people are the personification of evil that rivals the Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin and the Pol Pot all rolled into one ugly little package.
The governments that allow terrorism to root and branch within their borders are just as guilty as the terrorists who thrive at their sufferance. Their failure to act for the common good of all mankind when they know the terrorists are there condemns them to the cesspools of history.
Ted
Terrorism delenda est
*Edited later. Of course that's not $50 million. It's $50 BILLION. That is NOT chump change!
TEd
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but is it the one we’re all looking for?No. Probably not. "I know just what to do with these Arab people," Mr. Beckwith proclaimed on Wednesday to the newspaper staff. "We have to find them, kill them, wrap them in a pigskin and bury them. That way they will never go to heaven…”
"Level the country that's harboring them," he said. "The whole country. Let the world know that we're not going to put up with terrorism of any magnitude. Go in there and do the job. Hit them with whatever we've got."http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/14/national/14REAC.htmlWhich is when it becomes a maverick’s duty to speak. ”This does not mean that we should shrink from retaliating against those who attack us and the leaders of any state that harbors them. But at the same time we cannot deal effectively with terrorists unless we understand them.”http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/14/opinion/14STEE.html
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Hit them with whatever we've got.
nice try, mav; but you can't brush me (us) with those broad strokes either. I'm just looking for realistic answers too.
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