- Whatever your personal beliefs are about a rapture, this thread is a “what if” that may or may not have anything at all to do with it.
- Again, your opinion about an event that wasn’t brought up in the OP.
- I didn’t propose a theory-I proposed a scenario. If I was proposing a joke, I’d probably start a thread in MPSIMS.
This may sound politically incorrect, but empirically speaking there is a good chance that it is true - life may well become a lot better for everyone left behind. I say this not from the perspective that Muslims make trouble or anything of that sort. Under a Malthusian growth model, a shock to the population - like the Black death - can result in an upward shift in economic growth over time through more resources being available to fewer people. In South Asia, it is highly likely that this would be true. Pakistan and Bangladesh have over time come to have very small minority populations. It would be easy for India to take over what is currently Pakistan and Bangladesh once over 90% of their population has vanished. Especially since there would be little competition from anywhere else - Bangladesh’s only other neighbour is Myanmar, every country around Pakistan is also Muslim, and China is North of the Himalayas.
With no adherents to the religion left on Earth to create a balanced viewpoint, how will the religion be remembered in the history books? Would there be enough new converts to keep it going, or will it die out completely?
The M.E. would be a much more peaceful place .
The supply of oil would be more secure .
And no extreme Islamists conducting terrorism against the Western Nations and others
.
Just curious…
What color is the sky in your world?
Well, the last point would be true. The other two, not so much.
We tried, we failed. It’s hard to steal the oil when the locals keep blowing up the pipelines to stop us. And the government outright refused to cooperate with our demands to hand over money and oil in “repayment” for conquering them; probably because they feared being dragged into the street and ripped apart once we left, and knew it was politically impractical for us to just kill them and replace them.
We conquered Iraq? Sweet. Now when are going to update the flag to reflect this?
Why are any of those things unlikely? The US has the biggest military presence in the ME so I can see a quick grab if it is suddenly unpopulated, thereby securing oil. Almost complete depopulation is gonna bring peace as well most obviously. Though if the US does nab too much, Israel might not be too fond of us.
Yes because a vacuum of power in a region with great wealth will definitely lead to a peaceful transition. No one is gonna fight over trillions of dollars of oil, nope. Peace and security all around :rolleyes:
But if it was a real old school imperialist grab for resources, we wouldn’t put in a regime that would refuse us anything, or at least not anything that major…right?
You are ignoring the fact that Bush and Company were incompetents, and that it wasn’t an “old school” imperialist grab for resources; it was a half-assed neocon grab that tried to do everything on the cheap and while pretending that it wasn’t a grab for resources. Sure, they could have just marched in soldiers and told the Iraqi government to submit; but only at the cost of completely losing the ability to pretend that we were there for any purpose but exploiting and dominating them, and demonstrating that we’d been lying with all our speeches about democracy.
So they pretended it wasn’t a grab for resources by not grabbing the resources.
No, by trying and failing to do so.
I’m no fan of Bush, mind you*, but in all honesty I just don’t see the “trying” here.
*Specifically, before I’m accused of just giving that notion lip service, I disliked, among other things: his slimy election tactics (against McCain and Kerry especially); his entitled hubris combined with disingenuous, ersatz anti-elitism (like when he “clears brush” on his “ranch”); his stealing the 2000 election; his tax cuts for the rich; his attempts to subvert civil liberties and due process with “Total Information Awareness” and the extrajudicial imprisonment of Jose Padilla; and the smirk on his ugly face.
We tried to take their oil directly; the resistance blew up the pipelines. We tried to establish long term control so we’d own their oil fields (a neocon goal); they made things too embarrassing & expensive for us so we left. We tried to demand that they pay us money, and they refused. That’s three “tried”.
Do you have cites to show these efforts? I followed the news pretty closely and do not recall anything about them. There was some talk about this by excited neocons on the Sunday chat shows early in 2003, as I recall; but nothing after that that I remember.
Is this thread about the Bush/Iraq wars?