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Originally Posted by smallpox
If not economics then what are you talking about with rise? It can't fund an army unless it has liberal economic policies. All other types of growths in China are dependent on economic growth. No wonder you couldn't precise any of this in your post like a normal argument.
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Okay, I'll 'precise' this once more. China is creating a sphere of influence of loyal states, without regard to US interests - thus foiling any strategy of isolation the US could use against states on its terror watch lists. These states' weapon against the US isn't conventional force, so much as anti-liberal policies which provide the setting for terrorism to arise. (In some, actually many cases, this anti-liberalism emerges from below, creating somewhat of a policy paradox...but in terms of what we're discussing this is irrelevant.) Remember that Afghanistan for all intents and purposes attacked the US without any liberal economic policies to fund any armies...but still, poverty is not the root cause, and economic growth wouldn't help someone like them become an even greater threat to the US. In short, China, by giving these countries options for economic growth, nullifies the penalties for a state that might want to pursue policies that will result in terrorism in the long-term. This means it's at least two steps removed from any possible actual attack...but the sheer volume of such ties is still a cause for worry.
The 'rise' here is in China's ability to threaten US hegemony. Though much of this has to do with economics, it's hard to imagine that India, even if it did create a similar economic miricle, would be able to influence the direction of world politics the way China has - and (more importantly) will continue to do in the future.
This is nothing very radical here; nothing really in the way of original thinking on my part.
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So China was behind 9/11 hey? Is that what you are trying to say?
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Sure isn't. China is contributing to the root causes of terrorism, which could manifest themselves in, say 20 or 30 years from now.
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Virtually all states within the middle East are secular. Alqueida opposes most of them. Wow, it is true, you don't know much of anything about the region.
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And they all oppose Israel, which just happens to be another religion.
And the Iran-Iraq war just happened to be across the Sunni-Shiite split.
I'm not going to seriously argue that thinks that religion dosn't have anything to do with politics in the Middle East - it's like trying to convince someone their nose is on their face. Of course there are things that go on there that don't involve religion, but when you compare the ME to someplace like China there is clearly a lot more religious religious base motivation for anti-American activities than here in China say.
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Islam was not responsible for 9/11, extremists were. This is a war on these people, not on the whole of Islam.
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Its neither. It does go a little bit wider than just the 21 hijackers. It's not a war on an entire religion, but rather the parts that cannot survive without a political motivation. And Islam has a much greater proportion of itself that works that way than any other major religion. This is why I picked on the area of finance - one of the most arcane subject possible with no other way to explain the need for such new thinking. There is still plenty of room for Islam to explain the origins of the universe, for anybody who is really interested in those sorts of questions - but much of Islam is simply a political ideology, which doesn't help the world even when it's not specifically being used to justify terrorism.
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Originally Posted by iTaliAN_ICe
Neither was Iraq. By your logic, why didn't we invade the KSA, which is easily the most fundamentally and strictly Islamic country in the world?
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Not sure about this myself. All of the justifications given for going into Iraq would have been more convincing for KSA or Pakistan. (KSA's got more oil as well.) I guess Iraq was just a more obvious target, and given the short time allowed for introspection it was easier to just go with the flow. The military had presumably planned more thoroughly for going into Iraq, and most Americans probably can't do much more than pick the two apart on a map, so it was a perfectly fine venue to 'send a message.'
It's fairly obvious that Iraq was not part of any long-term endgame strategy, so we're basically left with some sort or another of consipracy theory.