[lit-ideas] Re: Why us?

  • From: Eric Yost <Mr.Eric.Yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 14:21:33 -0400

Veronica's thought experiment: I think about what Americans would do if Canadians started coming over the border with tanks, guns, bombs, etc., and our two countries are much more alike in the make up of their populations. Of course, we would have snipers, suicide bombers, etc.

___

No we wouldn't. If Canada were to invade, we would have a conventional war between nation states, fought between armies. The purpose of each side would be to destroy the other's ability to make war.

The purpose of each side would NOT be to kill random civilians by suicide bombers seeking some sort of celestial pat on the back from the Mesopotamian Sky god.

Civilians might die, as in World War II, when French civilians died in bombings prior to the liberation of Paris, or in Dresden, Tokyo, Nanking, Warsaw, you name it. But the goal would be to destroy the opposing side's ability to make war.

Terrorists do not represent nations but ideologies. Terrorists hinder the rebuilding of Iraq, and are largely to blame for the horrible conditions there not getting better. Terrorists have bombed mosques, tried to incite civil war by assassinating religious leaders, deliberately killed Iraqis training to serve as police, shopping in markets. It's a game of death Bush started...perhaps. But before Bush there were the UN Sanctions, before that the invasion of Kuwait, before that the Iran-Iraq War, before the Americans, the French and the British. Before that the industrial revolution in the West, the imperialist stages of the Caliphate itself, the Roman attempts to control the Parthians, and so on backward.

Me? I blame Tony Curtis for the _Thief of Baghdad_ movie, where he says, "Yonder is da castle of my fadder de prince." And for that I blame the Hollywood studio system, and so on backward to Plato's Cave.

Eric

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