At 09:38 AM 1/16/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
...At 03:20 PM 1/15/03 -0800, Petro wrote:
[Question of whether we could have avoided 9/11 and such things by not having an activist foreign policy]
No policy toward anyone isn't possible once there's any kind of contact. There are terrorists who'd want to do nasty things to us for simply allowing global trade, or for allowing trade with repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, or for selling weapons to countries with bad human rights records. Osama Bin Laden might not hate us, but *someone* would. And once we start allowing our foreign policy to be changed in response to terrorism, we're truly f*cked, since a lot of people would like to exert control over how the world's most powerful military is used, whom we trade with, etc. Even if we were just an economic giant with little foreign policy, we'd still have an impact by which countries we chose to trade with, and if someone could improve their fortunes by several billion dollars a year by finding a few gullable guys to strap dynamite to themselves and blow up shopping malls and such, I'm sure they'd do just that.> Secondly, other groups would have been just as pissed off at us for > *not* helping them. Not if the USG had no policy towards anyone. One more time, George, for
I agree we'd be better off with a much less interventionist foreign policy, few well-chosen allies (e.g., we're not going to be cool with people invading Canada), and free trade with almost everyone (I'd like to see us not trade with countries with really bad human rights records, though that's not exactly the direction we're heading in now).
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--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
