From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Tue Oct 30 2001 - 10:00:24 MST
On Tuesday, October 30, 2001 12:11 AM John Clark jonkc@worldnet.att.net
wrote:
>> We haven't given a rat's ass for the democratically elected leadership
>> of other countries
>
> Samantha has the childish idea that the man on the street is basically
wise and
> trustworthy so if something is a democracy it must be a good thing and we
should
> support it.
Not being a supporter of democracy myself, I don't see the point of
supporting oligarchies or military dictatorships either. Again, the US
government should just disengage...
> Well, I don't want a democracy in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and
> perhaps not even in Iraq because however unsavory the dictators of those
countries
> are in a free election they would be replaced by something far worse,
religious zealots
> aiming at martyrdom.
The regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia helped to make al Qaeda possible.
Most of its members and its leadership are from -- you guessed it! -- these
two countries. In fact, one of the best kept secrets -- from the American
people -- is that Egypt creates some of the most militant terrorists in the
whole region.
Also, the Pakistani government -- of course, after the coup it's much the
same -- helped to put and keep the Taleban in power!
The pattern has been repeated. If you ignore Jimm Carter's cry not to look
at "ancient history" -- in other words the 25 years before the Islamic
Revolution of '79 -- you'll see that the US support of the Shah of Iran
helped him to [unwittingly] radicalize the Muslim population there. Surely,
neither the Shah nor his US supporters intended this, but his repressive
policies basically destroyed the Iranian middle class and what hope there
was from the 1950s to 1979 for a secular, open society. (Today, Iran is
starting to move back in that direction.)
>> do you think the CIA was prohibited from being in the assasination
business
>> in 1981 for no reason at all?
>
> Fortunately it looks like the CIA will soon get back into the
assassination business,
> we all know who number one on the target list will be.
And it's about time! Once such assassinations begin, hopefully, war will
turn into leaders being killed -- as opposed to civilians or drafted
soldiers. If war returns to being a specialized affair of the elites, then
the masses will, hopefully, turn away from it and we can approximate and
hopefully improve on the the pre-Napoleonic view of war as just the affair
of kings -- and not of whole societies against one another.
Pax!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorks.html
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