AIW Sentiment

Posted - 05/31/2006 : 19:35:02

Dear Bulletin Board Guy:

I see you have written 7156 times to this forum. That must mean something. I've written some 20,000 items over the past 20 years. It means I am obsessed with the idea that America can lead the world to a promised land of economic rights and scientific achievement.

We both know prediction is impossible and models, even of the past, are mostly subjective -- and in the social sciences, only subjective.

I have a feeling that Milton Viorst's understanding of Arab nationalism is extremely useful: he does not see the end of the "crusades" as just around the corner. He believes, not too differently from your comment, that their future and the future of other Moslem cultures is driven from within -- not just by Western, Russian and Hindu conflicts with certain segments of non-Christian and non-Hindu people.

I take no issue with any of that.

Your main point appears to be that AIW thought is smarter than Bush's strategy -- that there was and is something better than conventional war against Islamist terrorists.

We both know that the greatest danger today is of nuclear accidental war, even nuclear accident. This does not at the moment involve Arabs or Persians, so much as it involves America, Russia, the UK, France and China.

India, Israel, Pakistan and maybe North Korea are involved to a lesser degree.

Now we are confronted by Iran -- and if there is a Shia bomb, by the liklihood of an Arab Sunni bomb.

Only a conceited know-it-all would presume in current circumstances to know more than the American government about how to handle the future.

We are the exceptional nation that might have burned down Russia in 1947 (I believe Bertrand Russel thought we should.) Harry Truman did not. Nor did America or Russia destroy the world yet.

I read Chomsky and a host of AIW's. They think they know more than our elected leaders.

They, and the American First'rs on the right, are, in my view, as wrong as they can be: we do need to save the planet; and our present leadership is weak on protecting the environment and the economic rights we have not yet turned into law.

So I may vote for Gore.

If Gore becomes the leader of our government, I believe, although his decisions will be far left of Bush's, they will still be the best to be found on earth.

Why so nationalistic?

Because the alternative authorities have a record: who in Europe deserves to lead? who in the UN does not belong in jail? who in Asia compares with the Americans and their record? who in academia is anything but too far left today?

I am with you if you say our choices are not easy. But one of them is conventional war to prevent the spead of the worst weapons to the worst people.

Another may be an alliance between continental nuclear powers (including NATO as one).

Yes, I'm a veteram of WWII and will too soon be dead. Yes FDR spoke of our dictator bastards whom we embraced to beat the fascist Axis. No nation can be perfect.

But no non-nation of individual thoughtful disunited critics can meet the willful enemies of human rights -- and hope to change their minds.

Our enemies are the enemies of civilization. We are not.

I do not know if you agree -- but if you don't you owe it to yourself to learn why Germans and Japanese would have died rather than change: they did not die or change until Russia and America killed enough of them in cold blood -- with planes, artillery and tanks.

John Gelles
http://www.tiea.us

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