October 11, 2006--Talk to Your Enemies
Talk to your enemies and look what can happen.
Remember Libya? Muammar el-Qaddafi’s country? The fellow who blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and killed 270 people? Recall how we bombed his tent in the Sahara and narrowly missed killing him? That’s the place. (Parenthetically, Libya also has lots of oil.)
Well, for a variety of reasons, including that maybe Qaddafi did not want to be included in the Axis of Evil, give Bush some credit here, through a variety of diplomatic machinations, Libya “came around,” including agreeing to settle the Pan Am 103 law suits, and as a result we have pretty much normalized relations with them.
One starling outcome of this thaw in diplomacy is reported in today’s NY Times (linked below)—through a US-based operation headed by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, brother of our Intelligence Director John, Qaddafi has agreed to supply every Libyan school child with a wireless laptop computer.
Negroponte the elder set up the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child organization that has as its goal the production and distribution of laptops that cost just $100 each. In his vision, if kids throughout the world had access to such a machine it would help them get a better education and connect them to the larger world. Libya is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand who are already participating; and Qaddafi is planning to finance the purchase of these computers for children in Chad, Niger, and Rwanda, among the world’s poorest nations.
What about us, you might well be wondering? Don’t we have some poor kids here who could benefit by having one of these? In fact we do--the 15 million currently floundering in dysfunctional public schools. At a $100 a copy it would cost "only," what, $15 billion? About how much we are spending every month in Iraq.
So what’s the problem? It seems Microsoft and Intel are also thinking about a cheap version of their own and as a result have not allowed Negroponte to use either their chips or software since they see him as a competitor. (He, therefore, is using Linux software and Advanced Micro Devices’ chips.) They are so powerful here, assuming there might even be interest in this country in such a program, that they have thus far managed to block its introduction by attacking as inferior the computer he has developed. In the meantime, it’s good enough for Brazil and now Libya.
Speaking of one of the former Evil Ones, Muammar Qaddafi, maybe he can be persuaded to forget about Chad and Niger and instead send some of these laptops to our poorest kids. Along, of course, with the oil.
Remember Libya? Muammar el-Qaddafi’s country? The fellow who blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and killed 270 people? Recall how we bombed his tent in the Sahara and narrowly missed killing him? That’s the place. (Parenthetically, Libya also has lots of oil.)
Well, for a variety of reasons, including that maybe Qaddafi did not want to be included in the Axis of Evil, give Bush some credit here, through a variety of diplomatic machinations, Libya “came around,” including agreeing to settle the Pan Am 103 law suits, and as a result we have pretty much normalized relations with them.
One starling outcome of this thaw in diplomacy is reported in today’s NY Times (linked below)—through a US-based operation headed by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, brother of our Intelligence Director John, Qaddafi has agreed to supply every Libyan school child with a wireless laptop computer.
Negroponte the elder set up the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child organization that has as its goal the production and distribution of laptops that cost just $100 each. In his vision, if kids throughout the world had access to such a machine it would help them get a better education and connect them to the larger world. Libya is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand who are already participating; and Qaddafi is planning to finance the purchase of these computers for children in Chad, Niger, and Rwanda, among the world’s poorest nations.
What about us, you might well be wondering? Don’t we have some poor kids here who could benefit by having one of these? In fact we do--the 15 million currently floundering in dysfunctional public schools. At a $100 a copy it would cost "only," what, $15 billion? About how much we are spending every month in Iraq.
So what’s the problem? It seems Microsoft and Intel are also thinking about a cheap version of their own and as a result have not allowed Negroponte to use either their chips or software since they see him as a competitor. (He, therefore, is using Linux software and Advanced Micro Devices’ chips.) They are so powerful here, assuming there might even be interest in this country in such a program, that they have thus far managed to block its introduction by attacking as inferior the computer he has developed. In the meantime, it’s good enough for Brazil and now Libya.
Speaking of one of the former Evil Ones, Muammar Qaddafi, maybe he can be persuaded to forget about Chad and Niger and instead send some of these laptops to our poorest kids. Along, of course, with the oil.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:19 AM
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