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World War III?
Global Business Network ^ | Peter Schwartz

Posted on 06/01/2002 4:24:03 AM PDT by krodriguesdc

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1 posted on 06/01/2002 4:24:03 AM PDT by krodriguesdc
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To: krodriguesdc
This conflict is simply an outbreak of the age long battle of good vs. evil. Fortunately President Bush has the moral clarity to approach it from that angle.
2 posted on 06/01/2002 4:44:16 AM PDT by Balding_Eagle
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To: semper_libertas
As long as they keep "their way of life" to themselves I agree. But when they carry it beyond their borders we have to crush it.
4 posted on 06/01/2002 5:35:33 AM PDT by DB
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To: Liberty Belle
Ping
5 posted on 06/01/2002 6:18:05 AM PDT by RichardsSweetRose
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Comment #6 Removed by Moderator

To: krodriguesdc
...nation-building... ...coalition-building... ...constructive engagement... ...address root causes of terrorism... ...new Marshall Plan...

Geez, did this come from Madeline Albright's press office?

Look, the author stated it way back in the first paragraphs of the article. These people come from a nomadic culture that respects strength and victory, and sees anything else as evidence of decadence, vacillation, and weakness. So instead of sending the Secretary of State running around the globe like the world's nervous nanny every time something ugly happens, we should retaliate instantly and squash them like bugs. In time, they will learn not to risk hurting us.

Coupled with this, of course, we should also make like a good shepherd and keep the flock out of their wretched and pestilential little countries.

7 posted on 06/01/2002 6:22:21 AM PDT by brbethke
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To: krodriguesdc
It is convenient and easy to blame one madman, Osama bin Laden, as the villain of the story. If we get him the struggle is over. Unfortunately it is not that simple. He can carry out his evil deeds because he is the expression of a much bigger problem. He exists because throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to the Middle East and North Africa, there are very few successful nation states. Most of them have failed to deliver good government, progress, and prosperity for their people and they need an enemy to justify their failure. The forms of failure vary, but all have to do with the internal struggle within the Islamic world that gets turned outward from time to time, as it has now. These leaders have only succeeded in convincing large numbers of their people that the source of their ills is the West, in general, and America, more particularly. America is hated both by those who envy what we have and by those who are repelled by it.

This is mostly BS. These states were mostly "front-line" states during the Cold War. The modernists tended to be aligned with the Soviet Union (or at least that was our perception -- e.g. Mossedegh, Nasser, Asad, Quaddafi), and the US backed the fundamentalists (e.g. Shah of Iran, King of Jordan, King of Saudi Arabia, Pakistani ISI, Emirs, King of Morrocco).

A consequence of winning the Cold War is that the fundamentalists win in the Middle East.

8 posted on 06/01/2002 6:33:17 AM PDT by Lessismore
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To: krodriguesdc
This article is full of bad history and naive assumptions.

For most of the last millennium it is fair to say that Europe has tried to dominate the Arabic world, with some success.

No, for most of the past 1,500 years the Muslims have tried to dominate the world, including Europe. Europeans reacted, mostly defensively. Only in the last couple of hundred years were the tables turned, when Europe gained technological ascendancy.

It's also extremely naive to think that, at this point, Saudi Arabia is our friend. To the contrary, they are among our most dangerous enemies. They are the cesspool right at the bottom of the worst Islamic terrorism, and they are still working against us. They do so covertly, because they know they are vulnerable, despite all their oil wealth and religious leverage through control of the Islamic holy places.

No, a new Marshal Plan wouldn't work. The original Marshal Plan put civilized Europe back on its feet again. With the Arabs, there is no similar cultural or civilizational basis to work with. We have already pumped more than a hundred billion dollars into the region--despite all their oil wealth and supposed religious brotherhood, these people have proved incapable of helping themselves--and the money has only served to make matters worse, funding explosing population growth and sick education systems.

About the only thing he gets right is that this will be a long, difficult, and dangerous war. Where it is going, and whether America still has the nerve and courage to fight it to the end, remains to be seen. There are still plenty of courageous men and women left in this country, but there are also plenty of moral morons without honor. We are going to be tested, I think.

9 posted on 06/01/2002 7:08:37 AM PDT by Cicero
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To: krodriguesdc
Swords then plowshares must be the essence of the West’s strategy. The military response will come first but then we must act boldly and generously to address the causes which create such fertile soil for fanatics. We must win a military-intelligence victory and then help build successful nations out the collection of failed societies and lead in building a more legitimate international order.

First we are to be the worlds policemen, but now we must also be the worlds therapist?

Nonsense. Islamic countries will never succeed because their religion embraces primitivism. Picture, if you will, nations filled with militant Amish. Could any amount of help we offered them make the slightest bit of difference?

10 posted on 06/01/2002 7:13:06 AM PDT by Lazamataz
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To: Balding_Eagle
We should back the hell out of all this "Global Chess" bull and defend ourselves exclusively, starting with sending every non-resident alien back ASAP and putting FBI agents in every Sunday service in these arab churches.
11 posted on 06/01/2002 7:19:16 AM PDT by RISU
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To: semper_libertas
"a new Marshall plan for the Islamic world then this horror could yet have a positive outcome."

Exactly the wrong approach. Such Western interference is exactly the type of thing which has bred more hatred, not less.

As proven by the billions of petro-dollars that have flowed into Saudi Arabia.

The richer they become, the more they are tempted by the Western pleasures. The more they partake of Western pleasures, the guiltier they feel. The guiltier they feel, the more they blame America for "currupting" them. The more they blame America, the more they hate America. The more they hate America, the harder they try to destroy us.

Radical Islam is the root cause. As long as Radical Islam lives, the horror will continue.

12 posted on 06/01/2002 7:26:30 AM PDT by Polybius
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To: Cicero
No, for most of the past 1,500 years the Muslims have tried to dominate the world, including Europe. Europeans reacted, mostly defensively.

It should be pointed out that while no European nation currently rules any Muslim lands in the Middle East, a Muslim nation still rules the European section of the ancient city of Constantinople.

13 posted on 06/01/2002 7:37:20 AM PDT by Polybius
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To: Lazamataz
Nonsense. Islamic countries will never succeed because their religion embraces primitivism.

I think the same could have been said about Shintoism and militant German nationalism. We successfully therapized Japan and Germany through military conquest and then occupation.

14 posted on 06/01/2002 7:43:29 AM PDT by aristeides
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To: aristeides
I think the same could have been said about Shintoism and militant German nationalism. We successfully therapized Japan and Germany through military conquest and then occupation.

Perhaps, but I am not sure we have the means to occupy and convert countries containing 1.4 billion people -- which is the current count on Islamics.

15 posted on 06/01/2002 7:48:37 AM PDT by Lazamataz
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To: DB
>As long as they keep "their way of life" to themselves I agree. But when they carry it beyond their borders we have to crush it.

Well, the thing is, many Arabs have a similar view of the West...

If the WTO/One World/Globalist types just stayed in "the West" then, probably, normal interactions, normal dynamics of international trade could take place. But the whole philosophy of the WTO/One World/Globalist types is built around expansion and growth. Without the CONSTANT growth, stagnation -- market saturation, resource depletion, other MBA type things -- makes the whole consumerist hierarchy/Ponzi scheme start to get shaky, shaky, shaky...

The WTO/One World/Globalist types have been "attacking" and "infiltrating" the Arab world through Arab quislings for generations. It seems to have come to a head over Lebanon.

Lebanon occupied a very special place in America's "New World Order System" in the Middle East. The utility of Lebanon lay in the fact that it was a "CHRISTIAN" enclave in the midst of a sea of Muslims (a place where "things" could be "accomplished" in the Middle East in ways that otherwise would be impossible were Muslims in charge); but the influx of all these refugees began to seriously erode the "Christian" character of the state, and in the process threaten the continued rule of America's lackey in that country, the Gemayel family and their Christian Phalange Party.

The Phalange Party had been set up by the Maronite Christian Gemayel family in the 1930s. The Maronite Christian community in Lebanon is an ancient community that - like the Coptic Christian community in Egypt and the Armenians in Jerusalem - has existed in the Middle East since the establishment of Christianity in the area in Roman and Byzantine times. After the collapse of Christian power in the Middle East in the latter half of the First Millennium, the Maronite community became important as a business "go-between" between the Muslim world and the Christian world.

Finally, after the disintegration of Turkish (Ottoman) power in the Near East and the Levant in 1919, the Maronite community (which by then constituted roughly one-half of the population in Lebanon) seized power in that country in conjunction with its French patrons and reduced the Muslim population to a kind of indentured servitude in the employ of their Christian masters. The consequence of all this served to heighten Lebanon's status as a "CIVILIZED" "Christian" enclave in the Middle East, a playground for rich Christians doing business there. By the late 1930s, Beirut was being touted as the "Paris of the Middle East."

After the Second World War, the Americans took over from the French as the Maronite community's patron, and hoards of Americans descended on Beirut and made it their playground, just as the French had done before them. Soon the American University in Beirut became a place where rich American students on leave from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite colleges and universities in the United States could spend a year or so as dilettantes and dabblers in "Arabic Study Programs." And not only that, countless numbers of "academics" queued up to teach there. The American University in Beirut became a place where "pretend" academics - professors as well as students - could retreat to and fake the pursuit of their studies or professions while all the while enjoying the Paris-like atmosphere of Beirut - a "Paris" that offered the pleasures of the Mediterranean Ocean and a climate to "die for." In addition to all this, Beirut also became the "city of choice" where America's oil elites could "dump" their families while they ventured on into the more "inhospitable" areas of the Middle East in quest of oil - places like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Bahrain, Iran, Quatar, etc. - regions where no Western women and spoiled American teenagers would dare to go.

[...]

It was in Lebanon that the contagion of Islamic fundamentalism first took hold on the Palestinians and TURNED THE WAR BETWEEN THEM AND THE ISRAELIS INTO A HOLY WAR; and because of that, it was in Lebanon that SUICIDE BOMBERS (which religious fanaticism ALONE produces) were first introduced into the scheme of things in the Middle East - blowing up the Marine Barracks and the U.S. Embassy there, and ultimately driving the U.S. out of Beirut like a dog with its tail between its legs. But the key thing to remember here is that the concept of "SUICIDE IN THE NAME OF GOD" originated in Iran, not in Palestine, where it was practiced on a MASSIVE scale by the Iranians against the Iraqis during the Iran/Iraq Border War in the early to mid 1980s.

[...]

But not so with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This was absolute RELIGIOUS fanaticism of the purest kind, and it was not - in the first instance - directed against Israel at all. It was directed against what the Mullah's of Iran perceived to be the world's "GREAT SATAN," the United States!! IT WAS, AFTER ALL, THE UNITED STATES THAT HAD SUSTAINED THE SHAH IN POWER; it was U.S. oil companies that had been robbing the people of Iran blind of their oil wealth; it was the CIA-trained SAVAK that had run the Shah's torture chambers - and not only did the Mullah's know all this, the people knew it as well. All this to say, that IT ISN'T ISRAEL THAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CREATION OF THE ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALIST "FRANKENSTEIN," IT IS THE UNITED STATES, and specifically, the greedy, self-serving economic policies the oil companies the U.S. sponsors in the Middle East pursue.

[very short excerpt from "THE COMING WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST," published September 4, 2001, by: S.R. Shearer ]

When cultures and civilizations are allowed to remain autonomous, then, within reason, peace seems to be possible.

But when a relatively small number of businessmen are allowed to place THEIR "good" in the position of the "good of the nation" then hell is set loose on Earth.

China did not send warships to Britain. And Britain didn't send warships to China because Britain wanted land. And Britain was not afraid China was about to send warships. Britain sent warships to China because a tiny number of British businessmen managed to position THEIR GOOD as the "good of the nation" and then use the national assets of Britain -- the British military might -- to, so to speak, beat the crap out of China, knock her to the ground, and then hold her down while they injected her with drugs and got her hooked...

That was more than a hundred years ago, but it established the theme of the modern era. Nation-states are now just pawns used by the WTO/One World/Globalist types to inject their poison into anyone who won't actually beg them to do it themselves.

Mostly everone in America who has 1) thought about the situation; and 2) not gotten directly involved in profitting from it; hates the WTO/One World/Globalist types almost as much as the Arab.

Look at the way American values have been screwed with over the last few generations. Look at the way American culture has been corrupted and spit on over the last few generations.

The only difference is that Americans -- by and large Christians or people shaped by Christian values -- simply don't have the option of waging psycho war against WTO/One World/Globalist types the way the Arabs do.

-- KotS

16 posted on 06/01/2002 7:54:57 AM PDT by KissOfTheSith
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To: *Clash of Civilizatio
Bump list
17 posted on 06/01/2002 9:59:59 AM PDT by Free the USA
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To: DB
As long as they keep "their way of life" to themselves I agree. But when they carry it beyond their borders we have to crush it.

Unfortunately, they will carry it beyond their borders. There's about a millenium's worht of precedent to establish that fact. Containment didn't work for the Germanic tribes, it hasn't worked for Communism, and it will not work for the Muslims. They are pushing us to a point where they will need to be exterminated.

18 posted on 06/01/2002 10:23:29 AM PDT by Future Snake Eater
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To: KissOfTheSith
When I mean "keep to themselves" I mean death and destruction. They can talk, protest and spread their "culture" where ever they like as long as it is peaceful and isn't at the end of a gun.
19 posted on 06/01/2002 4:23:51 PM PDT by DB
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To: krodriguesdc
bump ...
20 posted on 06/01/2002 4:41:14 PM PDT by Centurion2000
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