Just 10% and learning how to control what they create.

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As the message states, it takes the US just to cut their military budget by 10%, which is 40 billion dollars, they can provide for all the essentials to almost every single person in the world. On another note, the US are terrible role models, the US supplied Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, when they invaded Iran. The CIA also trained the Taliban and Osama bin Laden during the Cold War, when Russia took over Aghganistan. And now the US is playing police? They have already killed hundreds of innocents, yet they make nothing of it, and when 6 marines die, well they will throw a parade for them. If you ask me, the US is in no position to tell anyone to do anything.

 

I'd agree here on their unsuitability;
the US is by far not the most suitable police nation one can think of; however it is the only nation that has both the means and the willingness to give it a try.
Personnally I hardly care wether Bush' wants to invade Iraq over oil, has daddy's legacy or not liking Saddams moustache; it would be good if Saddam is deposed for whatever reason and most likely the UN can at least partially build Iraq.
Purposely saying build and not rebuild because I doubt that there is too much left too rebuild after 30+ years of Saddam.
I haven't been there but it really doesn't sound like a holiday resort, I doubt postwar will be any worse even before rebuilding.

 

Can't have too many anti-America threads, can you? They're always original, and always bring so much new information to the table.

It actually makes sense, in my eyes, that the CIA would have trained Bin Laden. At that time, the Soviet Union was our greatest threat, and i'm pretty sure Bin Laden hadn't commited any terrorist acts at that time.

But one interesting question that might contradict your thinking on the CIA training part: If the Taliban was the equivalant of an army of CIA agents, why did we kick their *** so bad?

 

Because they were no longer needed, dangerous and unreliable?

 

Ragusa is quite correct.

And that was the mistake. Although, getting taxpayers to understand why we should keep sending cash to Afghanistan is the tough part.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, wants an easy solution. And if there is a single thing that I have learned from reading books, it is there is never an easy solution.

There is a solution which is better than all the rest.

Preventative medicine. Get to the problem before it becomes a crisis. Which is what is going to have to happen with North Korea. And because China and Japan are so close, it's going to pull those two into it.

You can say the reasons for going into Iraq suck. You can say it's all about oil. And that we don't like Saddam. But the bottom line is to get some kind of election in there. Election being defined as "some sort of thing where you have, at the very least, two people that are actively petitioning for some kind of job". Moving up to a Republic or Democracy is optional. Right about NOW, I'd settle for just a few elections.

Also:

I am reminded of the French-Indian war. Where groups of 100 French and Indians took cover behind trees, maneuvering and pivoting, scoring 2000 and 5000 Red Coat kills. They were called "cowards". And "deceitful". Yet, they understood how to do it. By "it", I mean "wage War".

It would seem history has turned a bit, and the US is wearing the Red Coats now...

 

Umm, you may have misunderstood me, Ragusa. If the Taliban was basically an army of CIA agents, why did we defeat them in Afghanistan so easily?

@Tarsakh: Why should America drop their defense budget to help people who have done wery little to help us?

 

You do not help anyone else by dropping your defence budget, you are helping yourself. Supplying decent education, healthcare and such could do a helluva lot of good.

 

EJ

The difference between the Redcoats and the US today is that the Redcoats did not posses the ability to carpet bomb, daisy cutters, moabs, or nukes. The Redcoats stood out in the open because the felt it was the only honorable way to wage war. We stand out in the open in this case because we value the sanctity of human life, or because we are afraid of the international fallout of killing Iraqi citizens, take your choice. Either way what we are doing is saving as many Iraqi citizens as we can. There will be accidents, and civilians will die, but not nearly as many as would if we used any of the weapons mentioned above. Unfortunately, coalition lives are the cost of this.

I still have no doubt that the coalition will take Baghdad, I just wonder what the cost in human lives will be.

 

I have to say that anyone who believes that taking 10% of the U.S. budget would feed the world is naive. The issue isn't money, it's bad politics. Sure, the West could throw money like crazy at the Third World, but the corrution that is so rampant there would take that money and use it to buy weapons that warring clans would use to kill each other.

American money is best used to defend American interests. Every other country uses it's money the way they wish, just because America is wealthy doesn't make their $ world property.

 

Great point. Also, just because America doesn't spare that 10% doesn't mean we're greedy or we don't care.

One might ask that if other countries had such wealth and means to bail out other nations, would they do it?

 

Depaara is dead on. Money isn't the issue. You can always spend money without limit. It's the people that need to rise up and MAKE the government do something, because they sure as hell aren't going to do it on there own.

In California, there was a huge petition about refusing the property tax. The Californian admin. didn't think they could do without that extra cash, but the petition stuck and the tax was taken out. Anyway, their doing fine now and learned how to cope with less money. The thing is, you can have as much money as you want, but the only way you get the important things done is when you don't have enough money.

 

@Joacqin: Tarsakh was suggesting cutting our defense budget to help everybody in the world.

And I agree with Darkwolf. Times have changed.

 

Support for the statement that cutting defense budget by 10% would have the stated result?

*Crickets chirp*

 

They money *could* do alot of good *if* there were any good channels to distribute them through. If decent governments that truly cared for their people came into power in the poor countries helping them out to raise their standards of living and educational level would do alot more to protect the west than any amount of bombs. Sadly such governments are rare and I do not think they will be any more numerous in the near future, especially since there is no real wish for us to help out let them buggers become the consumer machines that we are. Atleast not now.

It is somewhat of a Catch 22, we cant help them if they dont help themselves and they cant help themselves if we dont help them...

 

So what the U.S., as well as many other developed nations, does is attach strings to the money they send in aid. For example, "we will give you $1 Billion dollars for improving your healthcare system if you permit UN oversite of your next elections to ensure they are really democratic. You also have to stop executing people for jaywalking." And then everyone gets all whiny and says the U.S. is "interfering in a nation's internal affairs."

I say, if the countries want the money, they pay whatever price it takes to get it. If they don't want it, they should stop whining about it. It's not something they're entitled to just for existing.

 

However impractical, sometimes I wonder how amusing it would be to say to all the countries who gripe about the US..."Oh, you hate us that bad, huh? *yank* There went the plug that just got pulled out of your foreign aid. Now we can afford another space shuttle. You were saying?" Some of them would crumble without it. I think we absolutely have a duty to help out those who really strive for change, but as for the others, you can only bite the hand that feeds you so many times before you get a well-deserved *****slap.

 

Funny guy, DeathRabbit! I wouldn't force the censor to star out too much or you might end up in deep doo doo.

But that's neither here nor there. I want to re-iterate what I've said before about the amount of money the States sends out in aid. It's more than most other nations. I know that as a fraction of GNP it's the lowest in the world, but who cares? I mean, in the end it's the bucks that matter -- I'd rather a rich guy gave me $1 Million (only .5% of his earnings) than a poor guy give me $5, even if that $5 were 50% of all he had. I'd appreciate the gesture from the poor guy, don't get me wrong, but I could do a lot more with the $1 milllion, if you get my drift.

 

I was not suggesting anything, I was just stating that the US does have the power to supply the essentials, no that they should.

 

[Edited ... point taken]

Carpet bombing, as well as the big bad other bombs, are indeed a terrific arsenal. However, superiority in firepower, though helpful, doesn't guarantee victory. Look at Israel and it's formidable air force in the fighting in south lebanon.
Every enemy faced with such a formidable opponent adapts tactics and tries to evade weapon effects as well as recconaissance. As the US cannot use the three depicted weapons on cities to avoid civilian casualties (and the bad press related with it) the enemy will *hug* civilians to escape and to survive. That's what is meant with enemies acting "asymmetric". Iraq has learned what happens when they build up their forces in the open desert, open to allied firepower: Annihilation.

An example for over-reliance on technical superiority: The US like to use drones for recce before missions. The israelis invented that. They relied on them quite a lot, in lebanon especially, and sometimes fell into a predictable pattern. One day a hisbolla unit spotted a drone over their area, and went alert immediately as they have learned that this was one of the indicators of an incoming special forces attack. Israels elite naval commandos (pretty much like the SEALs) went into an ambush and had serious losses.
And look at Kosovo: Drones there also didn't help much in finding the hidden, moving and well camoflaged serb army. They even found a nice, bold way to deal with high tech drones: When they spotted them, they started a chopper and blasted them, low tech, with door mounted mashine guns, probably not forgetting the obscenities to the operators first.

And in the end an enemy doesn't need much to kill, just mind the effect of a 5 ton truck bomb, or the proven lethality of a simple oldfashioned RPG or bullet, not even placed by a sniper, or a simple stone. Those at the receiving end will not care much about the technical sophistication of their death.

[ March 27, 2003, 15:15: Message edited by: Ragusa ]