Banking On War

Mr. Bush and his people did not invent this phenomenon, of course. The United States has been selling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to the world for decades. In the aftermath of September 11, however, American arms dealing kicked into an even higher gear. The Bush administration, in 2003, delivered arms to 18 of 25 nations now engaged in active conflicts. 13 of those nations have been defined as "undemocratic" by the State Department, but still received $2.7 billion in American weaponry. One example is Uzbekistan, a nation with an astonishingly deplorable record of human rights violations. Thousands of people have been imprisoned and tortured for purely political reasons, and hundreds more have been killed. Still, that nation received $37 million in weapons from the United States between 2001 and 2003. In 2002, the United States sold almost $50 million in missile technologies to Bahrain. In the same year, the United States sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of missile technology, rocket launchers, tank ammunition, fighter jets and attack helicopters to Egypt. The United States has sold millions of dollars worth of weapons to both India and Pakistan, two nations that have been on the brink of war for years. This list goes on and on. For the rest of the article http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080206Z.shtml My comments My comments: Having the luxury of time to spend as I please I and being single with no family I have chosen to the best of my ability to self educate. One of the first disciplines serendipity sent me was a power point presentation on critical thinking from http://www.ipfw.edu/phil/faculty/Strayer/WhatIsCriticalThinking.ppt Critical thinking (def) The careful, deliberate determination of whether we should accept, reject, or suspend judgement about a claim; and of which degree of confidence with which we should accept or reject it. It has be the suspend judgement part that hangs me up because in my opinion most of to-days world political events virtually scream out for judgement. It is this suspension of judgement that gives permission to the politicos

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