Re: Worth The Mission?

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:11:21 -0600, Joe Strout <joe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote,
in part:

Why is it OK
for that leader to send both American and Iraqi men and women to their
deaths by the thousands, but not to risk the lives of eight dedicated
astronauts?

It's only OK as long as:

the troops we're sending over there, to free the Iraqi people from the
cruel tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and protect them from the attacks of
terrorists are as safe as we can make them while they are doing their
dangerous job, and

keeping the Iraqi people free and secure is really what they're doing.

If they *were* going over there to steal Iraq's oil on a pretext, if
they were sent over there to bully and brutalize ordinary peaceful
Muslims there, then there would be a problem - as there would be if they
had a worthy mission, but their equipment and armor were not up to date
because it was too much bother to ask Congress for enough money.

Oh, and like the astronauts, those troops are volunteers too. If you
thought the war was divisive now, wait till a draft becomes necessary.

In a way, you are talking to the wrong person, though.

In Indonesia, it appears that three innocent men from its troubled Poso
province are going to be executed for a series of killings of Muslims
that led to rioting in which a thousand people, most of them belonging
to the Christian minority concentrated there, were killed.

This is so that Muslims won't be too upset at the execution of three
terrorists in the Bali bombings.

I just sent a couple of posts to alt.gossip.celebrities suggesting that
a possible appropriate response to that situation is to send American
troops to Indonesia with the purpose of setting up what would basically
be an _apartheid_ regime in Indonesia - with its non-Muslim minorities
the ones exclusively running the government, so they can ensure for
themselves peace, safety, and nothing less than full equality - however
much less than equality for the Muslim majority may be required to
achieve this, if malcontents among the Muslims try to threaten the peace
and safety the non-Muslims are to enjoy without interruption.

I'm not so sure that it is wrong to respond to the events of September
11, 2001 by creating a world in which every Muslim is brought to an
awareness that he has NO opportunity to improve his situation by the use
of force; if he is in a situation he doesn't like for some historical
reason, his ONLY option is to use moral suasion on the non-Muslims
around him - which means that he can never seek, or allow himself to be
suspected of seeking, anything more than equality, which _is_ his
natural due as a fellow human being.

The historical reason, of course, would be that some of his Muslim
ancestors had *not* given full, total, and absolute equality to the
non-Muslims around them. And his only reaction to *that* may be guilt -
no harboring any resentment of the Americans who put an end to that
situation by whatever force those ancestors had made necessary... any
more than Germans of today may align themselves with Nazism.

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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