Mr. President, Democratic Leadership: There Is No Such Thing as Iraq

[xoxoxoBruce]

by scourging them over and over and over again until they no longer exist and can't generate any new ones.

If you get a strike in every frame, does the bowling ally run out of pins?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

If you get a strike in every frame, does the bowling ally run out of pins?

People are not as easily set up as bowling pins, Bruce. I think you could use a better metaphor. Bowling pins do not have morale considerations, nor are they influenced by reason.

People, the overall necessary strategy is to reduce the number of Gap nations, evolving them into "seam" nations and in due course into the New Core -- or the Newer New Core if there is some necessity for partitioning degrees of globalization development to keep things straight in the observer's mind.

The troubles for the Core nations (North America and Europe -- the developed nations), sayeth Thomas P.M. Barnett, will come from out of the Gap nations -- the largest swath of which are much of the Islamic world and the bulk of Africa, with South Africa being the notable exception, and I think some non-Gap pockets here and there like the environs of Mombasa, Kenya. He calls this the "Gap" because it's not at all well connected informationally nor economically with the global economy and the developing global culture. He speaks of the Old Core nations (as above) and the New Core nations (Russia, China, India, Brazil), these being the nations and economies that are strongly developing and unlikely to stop or be stopped in their growth and improvement. Part of the Gap's overall troubles are political -- there are just about no genuine democracies in it, just lousy governance that runs the gamut from autocracy to kleptocracy, and mixtures of these may be found in any one country. The symptoms of these undemocratic societies are pretty common and easily observed: unresponsive governments that take no interest whatsoever either in good stewardship or sound national economy, lack of secure property rights, scant education and what there is is often sex-specific -- men only, no public health, damned little public life, and all the rest of the ills the wealthier nations try to address with foreign aid and charitable work and works.

You want less trouble in the world, you remove the political-cultural impediments to repairing all this, and one thing that means is devouring the terrorists, the fascists, and the obstructionists, alive or dead. Conversion of such troublemakers is to be preferred of course, and will happen in many cases -- but the ones immune to reason are not immune to the knife.

This is all I ask. It's all I ever ask. Some jackanapes will tell me I'm a terrible person for asking it. I know what to think of those people.