>>>>> "MD" == Mike Diehl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
MD> And the middle east is the only place we meddle? I think not.
MD> But the middle east is the only place who has overtly attacked
MD> us.
A minor point about grammar and logic: places don't attack, overtly or
covertly, neither are they persons, despite prevailing trends in
propaganda. It is just these kinds of elisions that make Bush and
Rumsfeld's machinations easier than they should be.
MD> Isolationism would eliminate all such meddling, but it
MD> would also prevent us from protecting our interestes abroad.
MD> Like it or not, we have interests. Damned if we do, and
MD> damned if we don't.
>> Well, I agree that no human is absolved of personal
>> responsibility for their actions, no matter what the
>> "cause". That said, I firmly believe that if US foreign policy
>> all these years had been non-meddling, 9/11
MD> If we had never bothered them, they might still hate us.
MD> They'd still have religious, historical, political, and
MD> economic reasons to hate us. You can't rationalize with
MD> people like this. It's just like any "Holy War."
Please give examples of a Holy War fought without any view to economic
or political advantage.
MD> Israeli tanks aren't the ONLY things that kill someone's kids.
MD> The whole region has been at war for 100's of years.
You have to get some historical context to make the above statement
meaningful. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European powers
(and, post WW-II, the US and Russia) have used the Middle East as a
playground for power politics. It's naive to attribute all of this to
"those crazy warlike Arabs".
MD> Israel backed down', they'd risk being the middle east's
MD> doormat forever.
No immediate danger of that, I'd say, given that they're the only
country in the region with a modern military.
MD> No, I think the Muslims need to back down,
MD> or be forced to.
Who, the Palestinians? The Afghans? The Indonesians? The Muslims in
Britain or America? The Nation of Islam? Refine your categories.
MD> And that is what makes these people so evil.
And the US so _good_?
T
