Re: cool read. honest opinions.
[quote=KinKyJ]Not sure whether they're really doing that (installing puppets that is), but you can't blame everybody for thinking that with precedents like Noriega in Panama and ermmmm, what was the name of the fucker the US supported big time during the war between Iraq and Iran? Ow yeah, Sadam [/sarcasm]
As for fundamentalism (rather call it that than Islamism): you have to be a complete ignorant to deny that it IS already a global threat. That's actually last week's news. In '95 I've bought a book called "Challenges and threats of the new millenium" in which a number of soicologists and political specialists gave their view on the coming trends. Guess what was one of the threats constantly returning? Extremism in combination with terrorism.
Now, that as such doesn't scare me that much. What worries me the most is that the Bush administration is still stuck in the Cold War discours and tackles the problems at hand the same way they would handle a CW crisis. The enemy is no longer a state/political enity with a uniformed army and a sovereign territory, it's a global underground network of independant cells. So bombing a country back to the stone age and deploying a huge military force has little return on investment (just look at Iraq).
On top of that, if you'd ask any terrorist who he'd vote for, Bush or Kerry, he'd probably say Bush. Why? Simply because starting an illegal war that led to a situation where the civilian population suffers great losses (doesn't matter from which side), torturing and humiliating people in prisons and locking up hundreds for years in Gitmo without any charges just proves their "right" and creates easy recruiting sources for their organisations.
Hell, I'm no madman, but if the US army dropped a bomb on my house (accidentally of course) and tortured my cousins in the very same prison the former dictator used have people tortured, I'd fly an airliner into a US landmark any day of the week and twice on Sundays...[/quote]
well put..... i think half (or more) of the problem with americans is that we don't travel enough to have any kind of inkling on how other cultures/people live. seriously, i know people here in ohio who have never been to canada... and as lewis black says "even drunk on a dare you make it to canada". all we tend to do is give the rest of the world the finger, do what we want and then say how wonderful we are and if you don't like it fuck off.... trust me, i love living here but the general population's knowledge of other people, places and things is abhorent.