Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I don't think the alternatives have been fully tried.

Good response.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

First of all, I was addressing the prospects and impossibility of dealing with the radical Islamists, not your average Joe Muslim on the streets of Cairo, but okay.

I don't think that we, as a nation and as a culture, have done enough to reach the Arabs and non-Arab Muslims who don't consider a criminal mastermind to be their spokesman.

Not sure what it takes. Obviously billions in aid to Arab nations over many years makes no impression. Going to war to save Muslims in Europe makes no impression. Freeing fifty million Muslims from tyranny doesn't seem to do it. Hundreds of millions in disaster aid for Malaysia? Apparently no effect.

I think that bin Laden knows he has hit some very hot buttons in the Muslim world with his manifesto. I think the threats of extermination with which he concludes them are manifestations of his own megalomania mixed with a little "olde fashioned" melodrama.

Before 9/11, a lot of people might have agreed about the "melodrama" interpretation. I'm more inclined to think he will actually kill Americans if given the chance.

I also like the African debt thing. If it soothes you to think that Blair did this over Bush's dead body, fine.

I don't completely agree with your view on tax cuts--I think the economy grows better with lower taxes--but it is a valid argument, and I suspect that if Bush did forego extending the tax cuts for the upper brackets to "help with the war effort," he might find it got a positive response, even from a lot of people in the upper brackets. Heck, it's not like he's going to lose an election because of it.

No "plan" to rebuild Iraq would have survived reality very long. The plan in operation now is not the one we went in with. Constant adaptation and correction of mistakes has been needed. Maybe total occupation for years, as with Germany and Japan, with our forces in charge of things until everything settled down, might have worked better.

I don't know what Marshall wrote down in 1942, but I would bet a lot of money that what he came up with in 1947 had a few changes to it.

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