Something to chew on...
This week has seen more of the same old sh*t, so I am going to let most of it just pass. I have an opinion. You have one, so we're even.
There were two stories that I noted over the past couple of days that troubled me a little bit, and both have to do with the middle east, (or that neighborhood).
Yesterday it was reported that the administration had plans to sell advanced weaponry to various governments in the region as a hedge against Iran. Big mistake. The United States and Russia are to weapons systems what Saudi Arabia is to petroleum. The world is as addicted to our product as we are to the black gold of the Persian Gulf, and to the influx of dollars that it brings. In the same week, I see that we are sidestepping our own stated policy of non-proliferation and selling India the means to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The ramifications of this move are, in my own mind, three fold. First, re-processed fuel has but one practical use at this time, weapons. See the rant above. Second, we are aiding and abbetting an economic competitor that wants to bury us. And finally, in licensing the technology to that competitor, we give it away, in the same way that we gave an economic advantage to China when we began to build manufacturing plants in that country. it doesn't take a great deal of IQ to see that there is a significant countercost to the economic gains that we reap from all of this.
We bring ourselves nothing but trouble by supplying arms to the peoples of the world. It is true that they will probably get them someplace, but what we are really doing is building for ourselves a legacy that will require our near destruction to obviate. Remember the evil empire, the USSR? Well, they collapsed and that was all well and good, but the people, the resources, the country is still there, same as before, without the bad reputation.
It will probably happen to us too.
And the new Ronald Reagan might be Iranian.
There. Have a nice day!
There were two stories that I noted over the past couple of days that troubled me a little bit, and both have to do with the middle east, (or that neighborhood).
Yesterday it was reported that the administration had plans to sell advanced weaponry to various governments in the region as a hedge against Iran. Big mistake. The United States and Russia are to weapons systems what Saudi Arabia is to petroleum. The world is as addicted to our product as we are to the black gold of the Persian Gulf, and to the influx of dollars that it brings. In the same week, I see that we are sidestepping our own stated policy of non-proliferation and selling India the means to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The ramifications of this move are, in my own mind, three fold. First, re-processed fuel has but one practical use at this time, weapons. See the rant above. Second, we are aiding and abbetting an economic competitor that wants to bury us. And finally, in licensing the technology to that competitor, we give it away, in the same way that we gave an economic advantage to China when we began to build manufacturing plants in that country. it doesn't take a great deal of IQ to see that there is a significant countercost to the economic gains that we reap from all of this.
We bring ourselves nothing but trouble by supplying arms to the peoples of the world. It is true that they will probably get them someplace, but what we are really doing is building for ourselves a legacy that will require our near destruction to obviate. Remember the evil empire, the USSR? Well, they collapsed and that was all well and good, but the people, the resources, the country is still there, same as before, without the bad reputation.
It will probably happen to us too.
And the new Ronald Reagan might be Iranian.
There. Have a nice day!
posted by eccentric recluse at 8:19 AM
3 Comments:
Not to mention all these people we're selling weapons to may one day decide they don't like us anymore or have a revolution. Kinda like Iran and their F-14's.
Pessimism is good, as in, the opposite of naive. But that's over the top.
We've already seen that the best of these weapon systems, even in the hands of, and backed by, the giant who created them (us), can only overpower inferior weapon systems... and even then, not render a country ripe for take-over.
The systems at our disposal will always be superior to (not to mention in the hands of our military colossus) the weapon systems we sell. And we know the achilles heels.
In the profound words of George Gordon Liddy... "if the goblins want to kill each other, give'em the bullets"... (if they'll pay for those bullets.. that's a bonus)..
That is a comforting thought, let them kill themselves off, but they have not managed to do it yet, and, I suspect, won't. As cold as it seems, I really don't have a problem with that angle, I do have a problem with the licensing of technology, and the ability to create their own systems--it is just counterproductive and in twenty or thirty years we will have done nobody any good. Consider the proposition that the sale of these arms and technologies does not exert the influence that not selling them does. I also disagree, in part anyway, that the systems at our disposal will always be superior. That may be true, but even a superior knowledge can be overrun by a numerically superior close second....
There are no certainties in these equations.
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