From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Dec 26 2002 - 14:14:13 MST
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> I would submit for those who wish for a longer term peace that
>
> a) It is a fact that Saudi Arabians funds propaganda, and jihadi movements.
>
> b) They possess a lot of the world petroleum.
>
> c) Iraq also possesses a lot of the world's petroleum.
>
> d) Depose Saddam's regime and one free's up another petroleum source.
>
> e) New petroleum source undermines the Saudi economy enough, to perhaps
> effect their funding of jihadi guerilla movements. This is a good
> thing, as Martha
> Stewart might say.
I don't see anything on this list that justifies a war. And Stross's note
about (d) is particularly well-taken, i.e., it's _their oil dammit_ and if
you don't like that you should be spending money on nuclear power plants,
not soldiers.
I know doodlysquat about international diplomacy, which is an incredibly
complex profession that requires years and years of training to even begin
to comprehend. I can imagine possible scenarios where all of this makes
sense; i.e., some very sincere people from three-letter-acronym branches
of government had a little chat with Bush in which they explained that
while the Homeland Security office will not actually *prevent* the loss of
major US cities to nukes, it will delay it by a couple of years and result
in the loss of only one or two cities instead of several dozen. Or that
if you don't depose the current regimes in Iraq and North Korea *today*,
Mr. Bush, no matter how bad it looks in the international community, they
will have biological weapons capable of wiping out 90% of the human
population within the next five years. And if so I would not expect this
explanation to appear in the newspaper.
But, even though I know practically nothing about all this, even though
I'm working with information that has passed through the media and is
therefore probably even worse than nothing, it still looks to me like
there is almost no possibility that the Bush administration is
implementing any kind of policy that I would agree with if I understood it
better. It seems more like first steps in the establishment of an
American Empire, including the repression of dissent at home.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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