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To: belmont_mark
You have yet to answer the question regarding why you are such an unflagging champion of donothingism.

There's many things to worry about WRT US national security. China getting a few jet fighters is somewhere around #35 on the priority list.

Hundreds of your posts, all of them decrying our call (that's right, "our," there are now many who believe as I do...) to restore military levels to what they were in the early 90s if not the mid 80s.

I point out reality--that you're never going to get those kinds of force levels, in part because of demographics (there are fewer military-age bodies around today than in the mid-1980s) and partly because the threat level is much, much lower than what we perceived the threat level to be in the mid-1980s. (I note that the actual threat level in the 1980s, while higher than today, was still significantly lower than the perceived threat. The CIA, after all, made the fatal mistake of believing the Kremlin's own economic figures, which, in the manner of totalitarian regimes everywhere, were "strategically misrepresented" at each level from factory floor to Politburo.)

The difference between do-nothingism (which is what you inadvertently advocate by demanding the unachievable as a precondition of any effort to defend America) and pragmatic realism is that the latter accepts that the force structure isn't going to get much bigger, and works with what is actually going to be available.

You clearly have an agenda that you will not share completely.

I've tried--imperfectly, I will admit--to be nice. It seems that you've mistaken good manners for weakness.

Very well.

All you do is criticize.

All you do is cut-and-paste, post links, and scream that the sky is falling because your paranoia isn't taken seriously the people who actually have stuck their paw in the air, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, and are taking their oaths far more seriously than Bubba the Hutt and his cronies ever did.

Like I said, folks like you have it easy. You don't have to deal with the consequences of a bad decision in this field, because folks like you will not be allowed to make those decisions. This is a good thing.

Naturally, this elicits suspicion regarding your goals.

Ah. If you disagree with my arguments, but cannot logically refute them, then I'm obviously guilty of some nonspecified heinous crime.

64 posted on 02/19/2003 9:35:20 PM PST by Poohbah (Beware the fury of a patient man -- John Dryden)
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To: Poohbah
Hey Poohb--For the record, while I tend more toward the alarmist end of the Chinese problem, I find your posts informative, level-headed, and honest. They've talked me in off the ledge on many occasions and I much appreciate them.

I'm looking for that Chinese rebellion sooner, rather than later. I wonder if we'll see any signs at their Olympic showcase in 2004...
218 posted on 05/15/2003 10:34:25 AM PDT by Antoninus (In hoc signo, vinces †)
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