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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (64649)	1/6/2003 2:34:35 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

We've about run this topic out, Paul. We are down to typing the same things at one another and, evidently, still managing to misunderstand one another. I'm not typing that it's only about oil. Rather I'm typing that it's fundamentally about oil. Very, very important distinction. I gather the distinction you wish to make is that, while oil is an ingredient, it's no longer the most important. If so, you can see I disagree. But we've now said that pretty clearly. It is all about oil is too simplistic to be useful. Saying the US is aiming at Iraq with the intent to manage oil prices is equally simplistic. It may well have been the foreign policy calculus a few decades back but it sure is not the case today. They are attacking American's at home now. If you cannot see how that changes the calculation, then there is no point continuing the conversation. I suspect that the "they" in those sentences is the other place we have serious disagreements. I understand the "they" to be Al Qaeda and its affilitates. I don't understand it to be the world of Islam, the Arabs, nor even Iraq. By generalizing the attack out of Al Qaeda, the Bush folk run the very real risk of permitting Al Qaeda to define the conflict as a civilizational one rather than one against a group of terrorists.