Meeting the MEET - by a member of the "Group of 4"

I am proud to belong to this recently formed "Gang of 4" - sorry, I meant Group of 4! This party needs to discuss all issues in the open, if we want to distinguish ourselves from the three other old and tired parties. Here is my contribution to this discussion:

In politics, and I dare say especially in international affaires, any two people might have three opinions on any one issue. That is because of the complexity of the issues, the background of the opinion givers, the remoteness of the country being discussed, and the written and visual material that helps formulate opinion.

So, who should we believe? And how do those of us who think for themselves, as opposed to regurgitating what they heard on CFRA or saw on Al-Jazeera, come to some rational opinion?

I believe that one tool is one that I have consistently used, and which I call by the acronym MEET, which stands for Moral & Ethical Equivalency Test. The best way to do this is to use an example, that of Afghanistan, seeing that the country is split almost down the middle on this issue.

Let us assume for now that 9/11 was indeed caused by those seventeen Muslim Arabs, most of whom were Saudis attacking buildings in the USA.
(But, for the real story look up: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-571690553... or google "truth9/11.org")

In this scenario those Muslims were supposedly connected to another Saudi living in Afghanistan. Thus, the injured party demands the surrender of OBL. The host country, Afghanistan offers to hand over OBL to The Hague, but the USA refuses and attacks. Now, people like Manley and like-minded individuals urge the participation of Canada, which has not been attacked or even threatened at the moment of its entry into the American invasion of Afghanistan, because we are “allies”. And five years and 81 dead bodies later we are agonizing over whether to leave.

The comparison is not perfect, but let us run the MEET test:
A radical Australian leader is living in New Zealand. He has admirers and followers in Australia, who somehow find the very complex means to blow up one of the major sports stadiums in Beijing later this summer, killing 3000 spectators and athletes. China, as we all know is a proud and powerful nation, and will be the superpower within the next five years, I would guess. It asks for the surrender of this Aussie living in Auckland. New Zealand refuses, and says he has not committed any crime according to its knowledge, but is more than willing to send him to the Hague. China does not attack or devastate Australia. Instead, it occupies New Zealand for 5 years and plans to stay for an unspecified time, with plans to make major cultural changes in its society, including changing the way New Zealand women dress.

But now the plot thickens. China, with its enormous might and very strong trade relations with Vietnam, demands and gets the full combat participation of Vietnam, since there are enough war mongers in Vietnam to make this possible, and since it feels it must support its neighbour.

The MEET question for those who speak for or about foreign affaires is:
Is Vietnam right to attack New Zealand?

Qais Ghanem