Advocate wrote:Blatham, maybe it is a slow-moving WWIII.
You shouldn't underestimate the militant Islamists. They are becoming more powerful by the minute. Remember that the bomb is not really out of their reach. Further, consider the damage they could do to oil supplies. Etc., Etc.
The question at issue isn't whether they are dangerous, but whether the present situation is analogous to WWs one and two. And it isn't even close.
For example, given some different decisions by Hitler, England might very well have fallen under German control along with the European countries he came to temporarily dominate. What possible set of circumstances do you imagine might lead to any consequence even remotely of that sort?
blatham wrote:Advocate wrote:Blatham, maybe it is a slow-moving WWIII.
You shouldn't underestimate the militant Islamists. They are becoming more powerful by the minute. Remember that the bomb is not really out of their reach. Further, consider the damage they could do to oil supplies. Etc., Etc.
The question at issue isn't whether they are dangerous, but whether the present situation is analogous to WWs one and two. And it isn't even close.
For example, given some different decisions by Hitler, England might very well have fallen under German control along with the European countries he came to temporarily dominate. What possible set of circumstances do you imagine might lead to any consequence even remotely of that sort?
Well, if you want to assess it in that idiotic manner I can see where you draw the wrong conclusion. Garbage in, garbage out.
yawn
Blatham writes
Quote:Militant Islamists of the sort we need to be concerned with (who have the professed desire as described above) number how many individuals? They have how many rifles? Tanks? Destroyers? Aircraft carriers? Bombers? Jet fighters? ICBMs? Dollars?
They have the personnel and resources and organization and manufacturing capabilities and standing armies/navies/air forces of 1935 Germany? Or Japan? Or Russia?
The question at issue isn't whether they are dangerous, but whether the present situation is analogous to WWs one and two. And it isn't even close.
Nobody had jet fighters or ICBMs when WWI and WWII started and other weapons were primitive by modern standards. Ever see the movie "The Final Countdown" when a modern US carrier wound up off the coast of Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941? That one carrier had enough fire power to defeat the entire Japanese fleet and all the aircraft bearing down on the US fleet. But despite its much lesser equipped army, Germany nevertheless enjoyed considerable success in the previous world wars.
If Germany had not invaded Belgium in WWI, how long would Great Britain have waited to get involved? Would the USA have ever gotten involved if the Lusitania had not been sunk? In WWII, the world stood by and let Hitler have Belgium hoping that he would then be appeased. When he invaded an innocent Poland, however, Great Britain and Russia began paying serious attention. Yet it took Pearl Harbor to the USA involved.
But do you think anybody was thinking WORLD WAR!!!! when either WWI or WWII started?
Now we have Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel and Israel retaliating. You have Lebanon appealing to the UN to intercede on its behalf, and Iran issuing stern warnings that it will respond if Israel turns its guns on Syria who Israel accuses of supplying Hezbollah.
If Iran attacks Israel, what do you think the odds are that the USA will not respond accordingly? Do you think Iran does not have as much fire power given modern weaponry as Germany started with in WWII?
Do I think WWIII has started? Not yet. But can I imagine a scenario that could create WWIII out of this conflict.? Yes I can.
Blatham writes
Quote:For example, given some different decisions by Hitler, England might very well have fallen under German control along with the European countries he came to temporarily dominate. What possible set of circumstances do you imagine might lead to any consequence even remotely of that sort?
How about if the USA and/or Russia had backed Hitler and the Axis instead of the allies? What do you think England's fate might have been then?
blatham
Quote:Humorous cartoon? Maybe to some. An accurate portrayal of the forces driving present US policies? Only to someone who needs an easy, simple-minded answer and who doesn't put in the effort to understand the issues.
You obviously don't know about :
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND US FOREIGN POLICY
Must read for those who want to know why the US seems to have abandoned all sense and reason in order to back Israel.
Quote:Nobody had jet fighters or ICBMs when WWI and WWII started and other weapons were primitive by modern standards. Ever see the movie "The Final Countdown" when a modern US carrier wound up off the coast of Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941? That one carrier had enough fire power to defeat the entire Japanese fleet and all the aircraft bearing down on the US fleet. But despite its much lesser equipped army, Germany nevertheless enjoyed considerable success in the previous world wars.
fox
The point here is parity of resources. The players of the last two wars had huge military machines and vast manufacturing capacities. Muslim radicals are of such a different category of agent that no comparison can sensibly be made.
Quote: But do you think anybody was thinking WORLD WAR!!!! when either WWI or WWII started?
If you are suggesting that a larger conflagration could arise from the present situation, yes it could. But that is a much different argument than what Gingrich is making - he says we are in it, and that's just foolish. Worse, it is of the war-mongering inflammatory type of statement.
Quote:Do I think WWIII has started? Not yet. But can I imagine a scenario that could create WWIII out of this conflict.? Yes I can.
Well, there you go. But that set of circumstances gets pretty hard to imagine playing out in reality, even over time. And whatever mix of circumstances one realistically imagines coming to pass, a necessary element would have to be enormous miscalculations or mis-steps by the US.
Quote: How about if the USA and/or Russia had backed Hitler and the Axis instead of the allies? What do you think England's fate might have been then?
I'm sorry. I have no idea how this question relates to anything real.
Now I see that Limbaugh and O'Reilly are saying the same thing, "We are in WW3". Repugnant.
I think, this really is a kind of "war mongering", perhaps preparing the public for more support or whatever.
At least, it shows that those who call it now "WWIII" are not interested in peace.
freedom4free wrote:blatham
Quote:Humorous cartoon? Maybe to some. An accurate portrayal of the forces driving present US policies? Only to someone who needs an easy, simple-minded answer and who doesn't put in the effort to understand the issues.
You obviously don't know about :
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND US FOREIGN POLICY
Must read for those who want to know why the US seems to have abandoned all sense and reason in order to back Israel.
As I have a subscription to the London Review of Books, not only do I know of the paper, I likely read it long before you. And I've read the responses in the following edition. And I've read Michael Massing's essay on it in the NY Review, and the responses to that. And I've read Chomsky's review of it. Etc.
Now, take a look again at the cartoon and my post.
Blatham, you are defining the conflict(s) very narrowly. It is difficult to define was is a world war, and having a definition is not very important.
Here is one of several interesting recent articles about the conflict. Who
is wise enough to select the best course of action?
^7/18/06: Feeding the Enemy
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
One of the broader tragedies in the Middle East is "the boomerang
syndrome."
Impatient Arabs backed violence and thus put Ariel Sharon and now Ehud
Olmert into power, while utterly discrediting Israeli doves. Some Arabs
seethed at their daily discomforts, and so they backed provocations that
are now vastly multiplying the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon alike.
I'm afraid that impatient Israelis may now be falling into the same
trap. Israelis, outraged by attacks and kidnappings, have escalated the
conflict by launching an assault on Lebanon that may make life in Israel
far more dangerous for many years to come.
It's easy to sympathize with Israeli outrage, particularly since the
attacks on it follow its withdrawals first from Lebanon and then from
Gaza. But the winners in this conflict, in the medium to long term, are
likely to be hard-liners throughout the Islamic world.
The Iranian and Syrian regimes are illegitimate, incompetent and
unpopular, but they may be able to exploit anger at the television
images from Lebanon into a longer lease on life for themselves.
Pakistani extremists will be strengthened in their calls for jihad. In
Sudan, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will rally popular anger to
resist U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. In Iraq, sympathy for Lebanese
Shiites may strengthen Iraq's own extremist Shiite militias.
Meanwhile, it's not clear what Israel can achieve militarily in Lebanon.
The 12,000 missiles controlled by Hezbollah are not kept in arsenals,
but in unmarked homes and garages, so it's uncertain that Israel will be
able to destroy very many. If Israel continues with a limited air war
for a couple of weeks, it will produce enough television footage of
bleeding Lebanese to anger the world, but not enough to achieve any
substantial shift in power on the ground.
Until this month, Hezbollah had been on the defensive in Lebanon. It was
under pressure to disarm and was resented as a pawn of Syria and Iran.
Al Qaeda had even tried to assassinate its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
But now Sheik Nasrallah, one of the canniest politicians in the region,
has kidnapped not only Israeli soldiers but the Middle East conflict. He
may well emerge with more credibility than ever among Sunnis as well as
Shiites.
A rule of thumb in the Middle East is that anyone who makes confident
predictions is too dogmatic to be worth listening to. Maybe I'm wrong
and Israel will achieve its short-term security goals, for it's
conceivable that the warfare will galvanize the U.N. Security Council --
and Lebanon itself -- to disarm Hezbollah. But there's also the longer
term to worry about, and the fury at Israel will be much harder to
dismantle than Katyusha rockets.
I hitchhiked through Lebanon and the region while a student in 1982,
shortly after the Israeli invasion. Though Syria had recently massacred
some 10,000 to 20,000 of its people in Hama -- the center of town was
rubble -- most Arabs weren't exercised about Syrians killing Syrians,
they were enraged by Israelis killing Arabs. That may not be fair, but
that's reality: Sheik Nasrallah's power today arises in part from
Israeli bombing back in 1982.
Likewise, the sheik's radical successor in 2030 will be empowered in
part because of Israeli bombings in 2006.
"It is simple to join emotionally in George Bush's culture war against
?'the axis of evil,'" editorialized Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, "but it
must be remembered that, at the end of the day, it is the citizens of
Israel and not the Americans who have to continue living in the Middle
East. Therefore, we have to think of ways that will make it possible for
us to coexist, even with those we do not enjoy being with."
Plenty of experience shows that Israel can't deter private terror
networks, but that it can deter states. Syria, for example, despises
Israel but doesn't launch rockets or kidnap soldiers. So Israel might
benefit from firmer states in Lebanon and Gaza that actually control
their territories. Instead, the latest Israeli offensives foster anarchy
to both the north and the south, potentially nurturing militant groups
that are not subject to classical deterrence.
If Israel is ever to achieve real security, we have a pretty good idea
how it will be achieved: the kind of two-state solution reached in the
private Geneva accord of 2003 between Arab and Israeli peaceniks. The
fighting in Lebanon pushes that possibility even farther away -- and in
that sense, each bombing mission harms Israel's future as well as
Lebanon's.
------------------------------------------------------------
advocate wrote:
Quote:Blatham, you are defining the conflict(s) very narrowly. It is difficult to define was is a world war, and having a definition is not very important.
I'm not sure how Kristoff's article, with which I find nothing much to disagree, applies to your point.
I am "defining" the term by describing the fundamental and recognizable key elements of the other two instances of its usage. That's not "narrow", that is specific.
Why not consider and label the War on Drugs as WW 3? It had/has a wide geographical spread too.
Foxfyre wrote:Nobody had jet fighters or ICBMs when WWI and WWII started and other weapons were primitive by modern standards.
No, but in WWII both sides had propeller fighters. The Japanese Zero gave us fits. The German tanks were better engineered than their American counterparts-their outsides were curved to repel bullets. Suffice it to say that both sides had state-of-the-art weaponry.
You can't compare what militant Islamists have with Western firepower.
Foxfyre wrote:In WWII, the world stood by and let Hitler have Belgium hoping that he would then be appeased.
That was Czechoslavakia.
Foxfyre wrote:But do you think anybody was thinking WORLD WAR!!!! when either WWI or WWII started?
They were before WWI. The whole thing was about colonial power. Each side wanted the others' colonies. For several months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, everyone was lining up allies for the war they knew was going to happen.
kelticwizard wrote:Foxfyre wrote:In WWII, the world stood by and let Hitler have Belgium hoping that he would then be appeased.
That was Czechoslavakia.
Foxfyre wrote:But do you think anybody was thinking WORLD WAR!!!! when either WWI or WWII started?
They were before WWI. The whole thing was about colonial power. Each side wanted the others' colonies. For several months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, everyone was lining up allies for the war they knew was going to happen.
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn used the term "Weltkrieg" ('world war') the first time in 1814, calling the Napoleonic Wars 1813-1815 such.
Since that time, the term has been used in German for a couple of other wars pre-WWI as well.
Merriam-Webster dates 1909 as the year when the term was first coined in English.
Do they not even make an effort to avoid hitting civilians?
revel wrote:Do they not even make an effort to avoid hitting civilians?
How to do so when you bomb the center of a city like Beirut?
Israel has the capacity to make Lebanon a smoking crater. That they have not done so would lead me to believe they are making an effort to avoid hitting civilians.
McGentrix wrote:Israel has the capacity to make Lebanon a smoking crater. That they have not done so would lead me to believe they are making an effort to avoid hitting civilians.
Unfortunately, the number of death Lebanese and foreign civilians contradicts your opinion.
McGentrix wrote:Israel has the capacity to make Lebanon a smoking crater. That they have not done so would lead me to believe they are making an effort to avoid hitting civilians.
As it looks like, Israel's "capacity" is substandard without the involvement of the American goverment.
It would be better for you if you try to analyze things and create an opinion of your own about the whole situation, free from the brainwashing American-Zionist media.
Ellinas wrote:McGentrix wrote:Israel has the capacity to make Lebanon a smoking crater. That they have not done so would lead me to believe they are making an effort to avoid hitting civilians.
As it looks like, Israel's "capacity" is substandard without the involvement of the American goverment.
It would be better for you if you try to analyze things and create an opinion of your own about the whole situation, free from the brainwashing American-Zionist media.
And Hizbollah would be far less equiped without the backing of Iran and Syria. Israel needs the support of the free countries to exist. Otherwise, the Muslim extremeists might be successful in wiping them out.
