The Next Wave of Boat People…?

[429 CJ]

It's great to see that I am not the only one around here with a bitter, twisted, perverted and sick mind.

I'd dearly love to serve on a jury with some of you, we'd have him being knackered, being fed his ..... back to him, changed into a girl, being left to his own devices (or at least those of his chosen society, remember - he isn't an Afgan by birth), and generally not having a wonderful time in general.

Unfortunately, the rampant tree-huggers and bulldozer speed-humps, have made it almost impossible for the government of any country to enact the will of the majority of the people when it comes to matters such as these people coming in. Persons who are willing to apply and who are willing to follow the guidelines are more than welcome, that's a fact. Those who don't - aren't, and that is also a fact, bourne out by our gov finally getting off their hands and doing something about it. And yet, it would appear, that those who wish to rort the system (the smugglers) get a meagre slap on the buns, told to sit in this room for about eighteen months (one jailed yesterday for fifteen, anyone notice the descent of the wife and kids, hmmmm), fed and watered, and are free to go and do it all again and charge whatever the market will hold them to move their COUNTRYMEN.

I realise that we are caught between a rock and a hard place (with their chosen arrival method being by water, which effectively stymies any attempt to relocate them, more rules and regs and international treaties), but any attempt to do anything with them other than take them is almost a breach of international shipping laws (and supposedly our duty of care). What the rules have failed to take into account is persons flagrantly abusing those rules that were put into place to ensure the rights of the genuine distressed boaty type.

To a certain extent it is our own bl**dy fault that we haven't gotten our pollies interested enough in the situation before now to take any logical steps to fixing the problem once and for all. One thing is for certain is that they are sure taking notice now (but for how long?).

[Buster Hyman]

Heavy Metal

Australia is officially NOT a Christian country. Bob Hawke deemed that we are an atheist country & ever since then we have had increasing numbers of Muslims coming here. To clarify that point, most of the Muslims that have come here believe in what the Koran says, ie they are peace abiding citizens, they are, unfortunately, being tarnished with the same brush as the lunatics.

If this is a war against terrorism & not Islam, then when will the IRA be carpet bombed???

[helmet fire]

As usual some good stuff from Wiley and Gaunty, but I do need to clarify some of the more extreme responses:

Compression Ratio says: >>These people are of the Muslim faith and this is just not compatible with western culture and never will be,.<<

Absolute Crap!! The Moslem faith is entirely compatible with Western Culture. Perhaps you cannot grasp that it is the interpretations of the ideals by individuals that pervert the belief so much. Christians are guilty of this too. EXTREMISTS are what is wrong here, not any particular religion.

Then compression ratio said: >>[Moslems] perception of the value of life is completely different, they believe flying hi-jacked jets into buildings and killing 7000+ people, will get them into Allah's magic kingdom<<

Again – Absolute crap! Moslems, in fact, DO NOT believe in flying hi-jacked jets into buildings. Do Christians believe in blowing up the London Underground? No? Perhaps you can see that extremists are to blame, not their cultural background/religion.

Compression Ratio also said: >> Now there are 20,000 more people willing to die for the arab cause<<.

You guessed it – Absolute Crap! ? Who are the Arabs? What is “the arab cause”? Given that the Taliban are NOT Arabic at all, do you have any idea what you are on about? Arab is a word for an ethnic derivation (such as Afghan), not a belief, a cuture, etc. The Arab (as is Afghan, Indian, Turk, Russian, etc) community is made up of many different ethnic origins. For example, can you tell me which of the following nations is NOT Arabic: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Iran? Did you know that Arabs CREATED a lot of our current culture? I say again – this war is against EXTREMISTS, not against Arabs, Moslems, the Middle East, or any other group you would like to blame because you have failed to grasp the situation.

Heavy Metal says: >>I have no knowledge of any other religion on the face of this earth that asks the faithfull to go and KILL others. So call me dumb, but somehow I don't see the PEACE LOVING people in muslims.<<

OK, you asked for it – you are DUMB!! Lets start with Christianity: “We will fight terrorism…there will be American casualties…[but] we will be relentless in our pursuit…God willing. God bless America” George Dubya Bush – 17th Sept 2001. Just about every religion on earth has been used as a rallying call to “go kill others”, and Christianity is certainly one of them.

Heavy Metal also said: >>4.How come that other rich muslim countries like Saudi Arabia do NOT help poor muslim countries? This question has been asked a muslim by a friend and the replay given was "because they have no such obligation to help each other"!! Amazing!! They have obligation to participate in the "holly wars" but not to help each other in need<<

“Amazing”??? It is amazing that you justify this crap. Why do we not go to the aid of poor Christian countries? It took us 30 years to help East Timor – and when we did, it sure helped our Oil Treaty! Many other examples of this, I am sure. But what about Saudi? They DO give money to poorer nations, they do pay the UN (or are you suggesting their money should only go to Islamic countries?). What obligation should there be between Muslim nations to help each other? Does some obligation between Christian nations exist? Please explain.

Did you know that there are many types of Islam, similar to the types of Christianity (such as Mormons, Jesuit, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, etc)? How could we bandy all these factions together like you seem to freely do with Islam? Should we go to war against all Roman Catholics every time an IRA bomb goes off? Get a grip. Better still, get an education Pauline.

Here is the start of your education: From Fartsock:

>>The reality is that the vitriol and hate that comes out of Usama Bin Laden and his Al-Queda cronies has about as much to do with the Koran / Hadith and Sunna as the Spanish Inquisition or the Branch Dividians had to do with the basic principles of christianity.
The sooner the moderate world, from all religions realises that, the faster and better we will be able to wipe the terrorists off the face of the earth.<<

Hear Hear!!

The only thing we should be extreme about is extremists!!
….and aquaducts.

[Tool Time Two]

I guess he's a Muslim.

[ernestkgann]

No, I'd say he works in Saudi Arabia.

[Wiley]

While the article below, written by award-winning author Arundhati Roy (was it last year’s Booker Prize, wasn’t it?), is off the subject of boat people, it is very pertinent to the comments some of the more outspoken respondents have made to my original post. It’s long, but I urge everyone who happens upon it to read it, (particularly those who agree with the sentiments expressed by compression ratio) and read it ALL, because, uncomfortable as it is to read, I believe the author is distressingly accurate in everything she says.

And before I set someone off foaming at the mouth that I’m supporting terrorism, let me make it clear that I’m not. But there hasn’t been a young man set off to war since the Year Dot who hasn’t believed his cause is totally just and the other side is totally in the wrong. The article below illustrates all too clearly that to many people in other parts of the world, what most of us would consider ‘our side’ is by no means blameless.

Given the high emotions of the moment, I think there’s faint hope most Americans could be made to see that, but it has to be said, however unpalatable it might be, and Ms Roy says it far better than I could.

(BTW, the boldface highlights in the article are mine.)

and PS: I have to agree with most of what helmet fire says.
Wiley

******
The Guardian (London)
September 29, 2001 The algebra of infinite justice By Arundhati Roy In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: ‘Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.' Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an international coalition against terror, mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one.

Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them. It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America enemies of freedom. Americans are asking, Why do they hate us? He said, They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support that either. For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle.

However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance, the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things, to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)?

It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed.

All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks. America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish.

However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow, to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators, and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly.

Before America places itself at the helm of the international coalition against terror, before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom, it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that?

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was a very hard choice, but that, all things considered, we think the price is worth it. Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the massacre of innocent people or, if you like, a clash of civilisations and collateral damage'. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans. There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants.

Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines, 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out, food and aid agencies have been asked to leave. The BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age. Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it.

When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.
Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a revolutionary tax'. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between Dollars 100bn and Dollars 200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban, then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists, fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be immoral are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves, and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has supported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands. India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely.

It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending, and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more rid the world of evil-doers than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their factories from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel, backed by the US, invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being wanted dead or alive. From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks, that he is the inspirational figure, the CEO of the holding company. The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that the demand is non-negotiable.
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs, can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence.
It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of full-spectrum dominance, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.

Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a Dollars 43m subsidy for a war on drugs.)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as the head of the snake. Both invoke God and use the lose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed, one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - If you're not with us, you're against us - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

Arundhati Roy 2001

[Tool Time Two]

"President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - If you're not with us, you're against us - is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make."
On this issue, I beg to disagree.
This matter is not for fence sitters.

[429 CJ]

I don't doubt that SOME of what is written in that article is true, but there are some pretty good conspiracy theory basings of arguments too. I noticed how SOME stats are backed-up by references, but others aren't.

If the U.S was deadset serious about destroying the country without regard for human life, then I believe it would have already happened, and the resultant nuclear wasteland would have ensued.

[helmet fire]

Tool Time Too - not a matter for fence sitters hey? I find it disturbing that you can simplify complex world politics into yes/no position. I'll use Pearl Harbour for example (seeing as how evey one keeps citing it). The Japanese had no right to attack Pearl Harbour - right or wrong?

Do we ignore the economic sanctions and the shipping blockade the US subjected Japan to prior to the attack? Why did they subject Japan to this in the first place? Could the Japanese position of Pearl Harbour being a "retaliation" to the fact that they were running critically short of oil (due to the blockade) have any truth to it? If you were about to run out of resources, and you thought your only option was to fight, would you have anounced your intention to the most powerful nation on earth, or would you have gone for the jugular and tried to win with minimal casualties? Or is this a more complex issue than yes/no?

TTT, I suggest you re read the post by Wiley because I fear the majority of it has not gotten through to you.

Lets use a bit of Prof James Reason reasoning here. Reason argues that the investigation of accidents is best done "in reverse" begining with the incident first, and working backward along the accident paths (remember the swiss cheese model) to discover, then rectify accident causation factors. Aviation has evolved this far but has world politics? Working backwards from Sept 11: Who were they, how did they get there, where did they come from, how were they trained, etc, has already been done. Same as the old-style accident investigations - who is the guilty bastard, lets fry him. Osama Bin Liner is guitly, lets bomb him. But Reason wants to prevent further accidents, so he asks "how did they do that?", what part of the sytem was breached to allow them to do that?". So did the US government: they instituted wide ranging security measures because they identified that if they had had better security (active failures), the terrorists would not have been able to breach the system.

But Reason warns us that to prevent futher incidents cropping up in other parts of the system, we MUST examine the system as a whole to ensure that the root causes are examined, not just current manifestations (I.E., active failures) be gaurded against. But what conditions (I.E. latent conditions) were present in the system that allowed the accident trajectory to begin in the first place?. By beefing up security we have gaurded against active failures, but only by examining the reasons these people feel the need to kill so many thousands can we possibly hope to really gaurd against the reoccurence of such appaling acts. In seeking to identify such latent conditions, we may find errors that our own organisation (Christian Democracies) have made that contribute to the situation. Its never nice (in any organisation) to admit that you too have erred, and to acknowledge that you may have created a latent condition that allowed/promoted the accident trajectory. Air New Zealand at Mt Erebus is a good example. But, if we really want to stop reoccurrence, then surely we must identify, examine, and consider these organisational failings, even though they may be unpalatable...at least if Reason is to be believed.

In other words - it is slightly more complex an issue than a fence, is it not?

PS: I am not a Moslem. I have not ever worked in Saudi. I believe in democracies such as the USA, but I recognise that the world is a complex place and that we are not perfect and not always blameless. And I do favour aquaducts.

(Edited to make (slightly) more sense - I really should stop drinking.......)

[ 13 October 2001: Message edited by: helmet fire ]

[Tool Time Two]

"In other words - it is slightly more complex an issue than a fence, is it not?"
No - it is not.

[heavy-metal]

Buster Hyman,

You might be correct in your response as apparently according to the constitution, Australia has no official religion. Point taken. However majority of the population are Christians. Thats according to the World Book 2001 edition. So maybe not officially but practically it is a Christian country, surely it is not a muslim country? or is it?

helmet fire,

I see that you are very highly educated yourself. I do not agree of your assessment of my comments as being EXTREME. You are taking the whole thing out of the contexts. Regardless of the examples of the "extremist christians" like IRA that you are presenting, nothing compares to the examples that we have seen presented by the other extremists/fundamentalists even in recent times. Yes I am fully aware that ther are various types of myslim. I am not preaching for the war of christians vs muslims. I also have known some Iranian muslims who were very nice people. Point being that we were discussing extremist muslim factions. No I do not approve of the American actions and their arrogance however someone managed to wind them up to this. I don't think much of UN myself as they do not seem to represent unbiased and equal standard in dealing with all the countries equally. Your comments seem highly in line with the carrent PC climate. Its time to open your eyes and see the facts.
Regards.

[Buster Hyman]

Heavy Metal.

Undoubtedly, Australian values reflect those of the Christian faith & I agree, if you had to identify Australians with a religion, Christianity would win hands down. My point is that a politician, took it upon himself to declare Australia as officially agnostic. I'm not going to argue the virtues or dangers of such a proclamation, but merely wished to point out that people of any chosen faith see Australia as a place where they believe they can worship without any hinderence or fear. That, to me, is a good thing. Sadly though, it can be used against us by the unscrupulous.

Further to that, would you say Britain was a Christian country? It may be officially (I don't know) but very soon, the population will comprise more than 50% of people that practice Islam!! As my old Mum says;"Where is the white mans country?"

[Spad]

Let's get back to Wiley's original question: what do you think the goverment will do if a boatload of ex-extremist Taliban soldiers with no papers turns up sometime in the not too distant future?

I don't care what their religion is, Christian, Muslim, or even agnostic, most Australian citizens, including (maybe especially) those originally from the Middle East, would find these people to be clearly undesirable as migrants, legal or illegal.

Maybe it's time Australian politicians planned ahead for such a contingency and wrote a few escape clauses into the treaties we are signatories to, treaties that are clearly being abused by the curren (and past) waves of illegal immigrants.

Personaly, I think it's time the politicians began insisting on one of the other clauses in the treaty in question - that the escapees should have declared themselves as refugees in the country they landed in first after making their escape, and not be allowed to ress on until the found one with a lifestyle and social secruity system, (to say nothing of human rights lawyers) to their liking.

Anyone ever wonder who pays the wages of these 'human rights' lawyers? I suspect it's the long-sufering taxpayer through the legal aid system. Someone might correct me if I'm wrong.

[Travelling Toolbox]

A noted Islamic scholar whose name escapes me for the moment said of the September 11 tragedy: "It was not four airliners that were hijacked on this day, but the Islamic faith."

As much as the US needed to avenge this act, it also did not go in boots and all as has been clearly pointed out - there is no molten sheet of black glass where Afghanistan use to be.

Would this solution achieve anthing other that to create even more hatred and give the agitaters even more fuel to feed the mindless. This is going to be a long and drawn out affair. My fear is, how do we say "enough is enough" and lets end it? Will we have any say in it?

On one side we have George Dubya saying it is a war on all of terrorism not Islam, on the other side we have Bin Liner saying it is a war on all of Islam (let's not mention terrorism) to inflame all nations following that faith into rising up with him.

Meanwhile more boats will flounder at Ashmore. More Australian money will be thrown at detention centres here and in the neighboring island nations and still more boats will appear on the horizon as people flee that part of the world.

Economic refugees we have already and they should be dealt with as interlopers, but this war will also create a new wave of humanity fleeing to all points of the compass for a more basic reason - survival.

How shall we treat this war refugee? More importantly, how do we indentify who is deserving and who is not and differentiate between their struggle to get here (and it will be heroic if they manage it) and the interloper who paid US$30,000 for the easier option (not comfortable, but also not forced on him) just because he liked the look of what we have better than his first several ports of call?