Posted on 10/05/2006 11:21:23 AM PDT by Pokey78
So you asked him to add the line freepers will save the world? It's still damn cool even if you asked him to write it, because he surely would have declined if he didn't wholeheartedly agree .
Hmmm. I gotta get busy & come up with something outrageous for mine!
Yes, I asked him to write it. It is still neat and I got it just for these threads and for the Freepathons.
bump
great read.
Lucky.
Suddenly, I get this mental picture of myself riding in a tiny boat through Disneyland's 'It's A Small World' attraction where all of the mechanical dolls are on fire.
I just can't comprehend the kind of mind that would write stuff like Thomas Barnett's book. That summary just oozes with the worst kind of leaden bureaucrat-speak that marks the world's most unreadeable books.
It seems to me that if his strategy could be successful, we would have seen it happen in Iraq. In other words, our army has in fact been acting like a "pistol-packing Peace Corps" and yet it has been conspicuously unsuccessful at winning over most of the factions in a bitterly divided country
Oddly enough I went to check out Barnett's works and they seemed fairly well written. But I didn't get to the point where he started playing buzzword bingo, which from my experience is out and out sadism against the reader.
Thank you, Mark, for reading stuff like this so we don't have to.
D
This guy is a Phd in Poly-Sci from Harvard-- but he essentially ignores and dismisses the importance of ideology.
For example, he asserts that we don't have to worry about China going to war over Taiwan because it doesn't make good business sense. But these sorts of things-- just like Islamo-fascism--aren't driven by purely business decisions. Ideology is the driver!
And frankly, this is the third time today that I have been reminded of the wishful thinking passing as strategy in regard to "engaging the allies more" in Iraq and elsewhere. Good grief, NATO isn't keeping up in Afghanistan--so why do the foreign policy elites still hold on to the chimeric hope that somehow the Euros can be convinced to patrol Iraq to relieve our troops?
A Steyn home run! I highly recommend his book (about halfway through it myself)!
Is it ideology or is it the mad drive for power? The book 'Mao, the unknown story' tells me that Mao, despite his facade, wasn't particularly ideological; he just wanted people to obey him.
Another great example of this is in The Looming Tower, where we see that nothing but sorrow and disaster resulted from Osama bin Laden's Jihad. And yet he kept at it.
He could have been welcomed back by his family, given riches beyond most of us, and led a civilized life any number of times during his struggle, including when he was financially flat on his back. But he deliberately chose poverty and jihad.
To my eyes, I was more baffled at the conduct of Osama and pals after I read it than before. For some reason I assumed there was money in Jihad and there was a nice lifestyle for him as well as fame and notoriety.
It appears that Jihad is a response to the limited opportunities under religious or quasi-religious dictatorships and yet their response is a drive for stronger religious rule! Surely this makes no sense?
D
"... some of us worry about a resurgent militant Islam and its attendant complications, some of us worry about global warming. In 20 years' time, one of us will be proved right and the other will look like ..."
Ouch!
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