could have been the strategy

Recently The Atlantic on-line printed this:


Whether you think globalization's various effects are worth worrying about depends on how much you care about people in other countries.  China is choking under hellish smog, but it has also managed to pull literally hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. 


U.S. inequality is up since Seattle [WTO], but global inequality has declined.  The industrialization of China and (to a lesser degree) India has been the biggest and most effective anti-poverty program the world has ever seen.  Capitalism has its flaws, but it works. ------ [end excerpt]
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This is what (I think) I'm talking about when thinking of globalization as a Peace Plan wherein we're exporting capitalism so we don't have to spend the 21st century like we spent the 20th, in lethal, scary, and expensive competition with communism.


"...managed to pull literally hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty."

And I for one am not ready to begin carping about pollution in China. 


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Anyway -- a thought:  the reason behind the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington, D.C., might have to do with globalization.


Picture this:


The "powers-that-be" or Brains Behind Islamist terrorist activities see the moves being made by the World Trade Organization, and they see the whole rest of the world moving forward, into technology-linked modernity, with only themselves left behind.


If some middle eastern leaders see their people, their societies, living in archaic, almost stone-age conditions, while the rest of the world, through globalization, moves forward to Peace And Prosperity (relative prosperity), and they know that it's their own religious fundamentalists, with their punitive, anti-everything attitudes, who are holding society back and keeping people in these conditions, the only thing they could think of to try, was to pick a fight with the United States.


It makes no sense, otherwise, for some not-very-developed countries to deliberately tick off the world's foremost super-power.


The way it worked was, their national leaders could blame Al-Queda, a supposedly underground, rogue force.  ("It wasn't us!  It wasn't us!  It's these rogue terrorist cells, yes, that's what it is!")


Blame Al-Queda, draw the U.S. into military conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, "tasking" America, basically, with teaching their people democracy and setting up, as best they can, a modern economy that can work.  Like the Marshall Plan for Europe after WWII.


Then when they're able to achieve modern economies and push their societies forward, to share in global economic progress, & when the radical clerics, Taliban, etc., shout in protest, their governments can point their fingers at America and blame us.


Blame us, for dragging their countries, kicking-and-screaming, into the 21st Century.


(Will they [the radicals] then be so mad that they get their terrorists to attack us again?  No -- because they will have lost popular support among their people, who will be too busy living a productive life in the modern economy -- they won't be vulnerable to becoming terrorists, because they have something better to live for.)

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