[NewTeaBag]

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I'm forced to agree with a lot of what borocay says above. But also, genuine external threats DO exist. Radical Islam IS one of those threats. No matter how much profiteerring and/or distortion of the threat by Bush and his admin, the threat DOES exist.

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I’m not saying terrorist organizations aren’t a threat.
I wanted to say they are not a threat for homogenizing the world under a single power and their goal isn’t a global dominance over the others. Well, the goal of neocons is exactly that (and history tells us who had the same ideas in the past).

One should make a clear distinction in between small groups which have some goals regarding causing instability or fear and when a superpower announce the same.
On one side you can’t expect any support in any country, no direct or indirect influence to media or church (if you exclude the most extremist preachers, who can’t get a wider support by its followers) and with very limited funds, weaponry and supporters.
And you have the only superpower left on the other side, which has unlimited funds, the best technology and weaponry available, with direct and indirect influence over media at home and abroad and is capable to confront anyone (just remember the reasons for iraq and following support by media and people at that time).
While one is capable to cause a lot of fear and damage in very isolated areas, the other is capable of causing a total destruction of any country, wider region or the whole world. Under previous actions, lies, media control, etc. the quotes like ‘objectively the Muslim threat seems much more dangerous’ sound funny and totally ignorant about facts to me.

If they can devastate the whole country, causing over half million of deaths and millions of refugees, destabilizing the whole Middle East and while the top cowboy thinks he has been called by God and acts as if Americans are God’s chosen people, it probably should be seen as a greater danger. Even if you share the same thinking about chosen people and putting the others into level of animals (like ‘they are breeding like rabbits’), one probably should be watchful, when a Constitution becomes just ‘goddamned piece of paper’, after reducing human rights at home or just by starting unnecessary private wars funded with your money.


"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." - Lord Acton (1834-1902)

"Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - George H.W. Bush to reporter Sarah McClendon in 1992

"Out of these troubled times, our objective: a new world order can emerge, Today, that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we have known." - George H. W. Bush told the U.N. on September 11th 1990

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." - G.W. Bush, Gridiron Club dinner, Wash., D.C. March 2001

"It is a quite special secret pleasure how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them." - Adolph Hitler

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OK. I accede one side (The superpower:USA today perhaps China a few years on) does have more power to cause greater harm on a greater scale than the radical Muslims of today. Also, it's our country/superpower so we are responsible for changing it's direction when we think it's heading wrong.

In the land of the semirelevant analogy (poli forum [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]) I'll try this.

Perhaps Bush/Co/profiteers is the gunshot wound that needs to be dealt with immediately from a triage point of view. The threat of the growing base of Radical Islam though is the deadly cancer, which may not kill us today or tomorrow, but doesn't mean we shouldn't treat it vigorously NOW before IT becomes the "gunshot wound".