[extropy-chat] PRECOG: The Smoking Gun is found..

[Rob KPO]

The USA displayed a learning in Korea that military pre-emption is required
in the real world when their is armed conflict. It is obviously a difficult
decision politically and people unlearned in military history can easily
interpret it as negative, bad, evil etc.

That learning was proved with the subsequant Chinese reinforcement on the
Korean peninsula. Vietnam was another example of pre-emptive action, or to
put it another way, pre-deployement of forces against a larger nearby
threat. Luckily in Vietnam the Chinese did not engage the US forces by
invading Vietnam.

The Middle East situation is different in context but I think it is fair to
say the US military is acting predictably in the best interest's of dealing
with the nature of this hostile threat. It isnt Chinese expansion this time
but militant radical Islam and any state's or organisation's supporting it.

The UN is easily rendered powerless in times of largish war. This was
highlited with the French and Russian's (who seemingly had reasons to
protect Saddam's Iraq) taking advantage of the UN's 'democratic' processes
to sieze up the capability it would otherwise have had to attempt a
bloodless action in Iraq. The world had a chance to stand together and tell
the people of Iraq "time to join the rest of the world" instead they ended
up again trading the security of the world and the USA for their own selfish
commerce and vision's of grandeur.

Rob O

---- Original Message -----
From: "Samantha Atkins" <samantha at objectent.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:58 PM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] PRECOG: The Smoking Gun is found..


> No, I don't think that he would have left office.  And I know that
> getting him out of office did not justify our invasion or the huge
> costs imposed on the American people for this misadventure.   If Saddam
> had left I would bet dollars to donuts that Busholini would have found
> another excuse to invade.
>
> When you invade a country you can expect resistance from the people
> themselves, from any friends they may have and from anyone else that
> has a serious enough beef with the invaders.  Whether the rest of the
> world agrees with the invasion or not does not change this appreciably.
>     If your country were invaded would you give a damn how many
> country's diplomats supported the invasion?  I doubt it very much.
>
> It is never benign for one nation to be the sole superpower by
> threatening to forever suppress the advancement of all other nations or
> organizations of nations to any level that might be competitive.  Nor
> is it benign for a superpower to do whatever the hell it wants simply
> because it cannot be paused by force.
>
> Given the facts of no WMD in Iraq invasion was wrong regardless of how
> many nations did or did not agree.    So I concur that whether the
> action was right or wrong is separable from whether there was a larger
> consensus.
>
> - samantha
>
> On Jan 28, 2004, at 8:35 PM, Mike Lorrey wrote: