Comments Posted By Bill Arnold
Displaying 71 To 80 Of 118 Comments
Here's the link. http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1224
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.07.2007 @ 21:04
Re Iran and Israel, here's an interesting interview with a former Mossad director (1989 to 1996). He is quite convinced that the Iranian leadership has religious motivations for pursuing WMDs and ballistic missile systems: "All devout Muslims are instructed to be proactive to hasten the reappearance of the Mahdi."
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.07.2007 @ 21:03
The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 16.07.2007 @ 17:49
This is the impression the administration has been emitting for months (closer to a year) now. I've been hoping the impression is primarily a negotiation tool, but it's hard to tell, which is the point - the Iranians can't be sure. (Cheney's involvement is necessary to make the possibility that it's real more convincing.)
ARE CONSERVATIVES REALLY HOPING FOR ANOTHER 9/11?
If we had lobbed a few cruise missiles at Bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan rather than going for regime change, would there be Muslim doctors trying to blow up airports?
AQ in Afghanistan was basically paying rent to the Taliban. It was also clear that 9/11 was a signature AQ attack (or a conspiracy designed to look like one, but that way lay madness.)
Regime change was a reasonable option even for non-absolute pacifists. Some of the other alternatives were:
(a) cruise missile strikes
(a.2) nothing. (Not an option.)
(b) a targeted operation (airborne?) on the camps. (very risky)
(c) negotiations with the Taliban. (Hah. These were the guys who blew up the stone Buddhas.)
(c.2) Serious negotiations with the Taliban with regime change as a clear threat. (This was plausible at least.)The major issue with regime change was follow-through. The pacifist side of my family was dismayed when it became clear that the reconstruction side of the follow-through wasn't being taken seriously - the mocking dismissal of the "Afghan winter" issue and the minuscule and botched food drops were bad signs to them that the US government wasn't particularly interested in reconstruction. The escape of important parts of the AQ membership to Pakistan was another early bad sign.
Directly answering your question, no, probably no Moslem doctors trying to blow up airports, with "explosives" that were ridiculously amateurish. However, there would have been more well-organized, well-executed attacks originating from Afghanistan, and probably more well-executed attacks by franchisees.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 14.07.2007 @ 21:02
NEW JIHADI VIDEO GIVES HEART TO TERRORISTS
Drongo, Well, at present they haven’t and short of vigorous nuclear controls I don’t see what anyone can do to improve our chances of them not managing to get them.
Agreed that it's hard to estimate the chances that terrorists will acquire WMDs (which included biologicals). I think you may be overestimating the resilience of civilization, but that's a deeper and rather speculative discussion.Decreasing the odds that terrorists (or their state partners) acquire WMDs should be one of our primary focuses IMO; the endgame involving them is simply not acceptable. They also need to understand that the response to use of WMDs is likely as not to be closer to genocidal in scale than not.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 5.07.2007 @ 14:15
Drango, I'm with you almost entirely, however "2) Terrorism is almost an irrelevance to our lives." is a statement about current terrorist activities. Terrorism involving WMDs (and here I mean real WMDs, e.g. nuclear weapons, not a definition used to make it easier to prosecute wanabees) is qualitatively different - it could be a real threat to civilization.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 5.07.2007 @ 10:42
You really think this wasn’t intentionally leaked? Your lack of cynicism is charming in its way.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 23.05.2007 @ 12:21
Positing that it was intentionally leaked by or at the orders of the leadership of the administration, what would the motive for such a leak be? I'm struggling to find a motive that makes sense.
12 million undocumented, $5000 fine, unless I misread something that's 60 billion dollars if everyone goes for the Z. Enough to pay for the Iraq war for 7 months or so.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 17.05.2007 @ 17:25
(Only 80% kidding.)
So we run away from Iraq, telling moderates that to ferret out terrorists, like the guy in NJ did, don’t bother, we will inspect cargo containers!
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 12.05.2007 @ 21:21
An informer and police work ferreted out the plot in NJ, not troops in Iraq. And we're utterly nuts not to be inspecting cargo entering our country. (Or being 10 times as serious as we are about nuclear proliferation, and securing of weapons grade uranium/plutonium.)
TIME IS NOW THE BIGGEST ENEMY IN IRAQ
ajacksonian - Once we leave Iraq (also Afghanistan because it will become a bridge too far) you will probably see all of the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and possibly Indonesia and Thailand become part of a growing Caliphate. How long this will take I am not sure but it will probably be a lot quicker than anyone can imagine. What follows that will be the subjugation of certain parts of the old Soviet Union, India, and large parts of Europe.
Comment Posted By Bill Arnold On 28.04.2007 @ 19:42
This argument has never made sense to me. It's the Communist domino theory refactored as the Islamic Theocracy domino theory. When we left Vietnam, a few dominos fell, but not a chain.
The prime worry is Pakistan. They are seriously nuclear armed and a move to a theocracy there would be extremely dangerous. (Iran is also a threat, which will probably be imminent in a few years.)
Strong economic, cultural, educational (etc) ties with non-theocratic moslem-majority countries are very important IMO.
