09-24-2017, 01:01 PM
(09-24-2017, 07:24 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: The problem with this reasoning is that it's Unraveling Era reasoning.
In the 1990s we could have the Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield), we
could prosecute the World Trade Center bombers, we could flee from
Mogadishu, we could bomb the Bosnian Serbs (Operation Deliberate
Force), we could bomb Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Operation Desert Fox),
and we could do all of these things without triggering a wider war.
That's what happens in an Unraveling Era.
In a Crisis Era it's different. Any action today like the ones above
could easily trigger a wider war. A good example is the Arab Spring,
that began in 2011, which was triggered very simply by the death of a
Tunisian food vendor. It led to several coups in Egypt, the war in
Libya, the war in Yemen, the war in Syria, the new war in Iraq, the
rise of ISIS, the Saudi-Iran split, the Saudi-Qatar split, the
Russia-Iran-Hezbollah-Turkey-US proxy war in Syria, the flood of ten
million refugees into countries neighboring Syria and Iraq, the flood
of over a million refugees into Europe, increased tensions in the
Caucasus, etc. Did I forget anything?
So if the death of a Tunisian food vendor can trigger all of those
wars, imagine what an American attack on North Korea could trigger.
As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the BBC, with its usual
anti-American anti-Trump "reporting," showing one "expert" after
another blaming Trump's WORDS for bringing the world to the brink of
WW III. Can you even imagine how all these people would be blaming
Trump and America after a military attack?
Or just look at some of the threads in this forum. How many of the
left-wing posters on this forum would be thanking Trump for bombing
North Korea? That's really laughable.
(The BBC is now accusing Trump of causing some kind of racial war in
the US for criticizing NFL players for dishonoring the American flag
and country. The BBC is valuable because it has correspondents around
the world, but their garbage editorial policies are entirely
predictable. How do you think they'd react to "Trump's military
attack" on North Korea?)
One of the major reasons that generational theory works as it does is
because so many people have lived through Awakening and Unraveling
eras when the survivor generations prevent small wars from spreading
into bigger ones, and think that the same thing will happen in a
Crisis era, which, of course, it won't.
Can you clarify which reasoning you're talking about and what you see as the problem?
I don't see potential triggering of the crisis was as necessarily a problem, since we're both agreed that the crisis war is inevitable. Do you just want to put it off as long as possible? Or are you worried about the left getting the upper hand politically?
There's now news that Iran is testing missiles and we know that they've had observers at all North Korean nuclear tests; most likely they have arrangements to buy the warheads that their deal with the US doesn't permit them to test. If we do nothing about North Korea, we can expect rapid proliferation to people who hate the US. That makes it more likely that the first nuclear strikes will target American population centers. To me, that's a bad thing, because it gives use less warning and less time to prepare, such as by dispersing to less densely populated areas. What am I missing?
