Common Sense And as simple as 1, 2, 3.
They want a Holy War, I don't think so....
1) The US Bombs them
2) The Russians give them Military Support, hardware
3) And they wear Chinese Uniforms
What Does that really mean? Read the whole post and you will understand what the Press a.k.a. talking heads don't.
They are set to attack again? I find eating steal nails down to the Barn tuffs me up....I got $460 in dental bills this year....and Woody always wants to top off a pound of nails with a beer.
But this is a Good thought provoking posting for Americans at War. What on Earth do we do when our self-defense causes all those Islamic Nations to rise up against us?. Answer...
1) How long has China been trying to get into the World Trade Organization?...15 Years Check out News, Mexico and US before this event....More Importantly, ask yourself how do they all get in at once? The answer is in 3, but you have to read 1 & 2 to know how big this is going to be...IMO.
Thursday September 13 1:07 PM ET
Official: China Signs WTO Entry Deal with Mexico
By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - China and Mexico on Thursday signed an accord removing a hurdle to Beijing's accession to the World Trade Organization (news - web sites), but the largest barrier to Chinese membership remained in place.
WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said no details were yet available on the accord, which had been delayed for nearly a year over disagreements on how far Mexico would open its market to Chinese consumer goods.
Trade diplomats welcomed the deal but said it left in place the main roadblock to China's entry -- a disagreement between the European Union (news - web sites) and United States over terms for operations of foreign insurance firms.
``There is no movement on that front,'' said a negotiator involved in talks in Geneva aimed at clearing final barriers to an entry package for China shaped over 15 years of talks.
Diplomats said the Mexican government planned a news conference in Mexico City later in the day to give details of the accord, signed in Geneva by Mexico's WTO ambassador Eduardo Perez Motta and China's envoy Sha Zukang.
Mexico had already said it would not block an overall accord if it had not reached a deal.
Mexican consumer industries -- especially footwear and textiles -- have voiced strong concern that they could be priced out of domestic and foreign markets by cheaper Chinese imports.
Mexico had insisted it must maintain anti-dumping measures against similar goods from China for up to 15 years after China became a member of the currently 142-nation body.
China had reportedly negotiated for an eight-year maximum.
Chinese and WTO officials had hoped originally that the overall entry package would have been approved on Thursday at a formal session of the trade body's working party on China.
Admission would then have been formally approved by WTO ministers meeting in Qatar in November, allowing China -- and then Taiwan -- to enter by the end of the year.
But Thursday's session was postponed until next Monday in the wake of terror attacks in New York and Washington.
Negotiators say the delay may give time for the EU, United States and China to resolve the insurance issue -- in which the influential U.S. American Insurance Group Inc is playing a role.
AIG, founded in Shanghai in the 1920s, has a strong position in China, owning its operations there 100 percent.
The firm, and U.S. officials, argue that wording of the bilateral U.S.-Chinese deal -- incorporated into the overall package -- means it will be able to have full ownership of any new branches it might open.
But the EU says that would discriminate against firms from its 15 members, since under Brussels' deal with China they would be able to hold only 50 per cent of equity in new operations.
us.news2.yimg.com
2) Now what's up with Russia? Russia hopes for good WTO terms after Sept 11
By Julie Tolkacheva
MOSCOW, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Russia hopes for favourable terms for joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in view of its support for the anti-terrorism coalition formed by the United States, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Tuesday.
"The number of favourable factors for joining the WTO is now maximal: economic growth...and politically favourable relations after the September 11 events, the understanding that we have a lot in common," Kudrin said of the global trade body.
"Political support to get terms which are comfortable for Russia makes our plans realistic."
Russia has strongly supported the anti-terrrorism coalition formed by the United States after the attacks on its cities on September 11 and has backed the air raids on Afghanistan.
It has said the cooperation has created a new, more friendly atmosphere in East-West relations.
Kudrin said Russia would boost efforts to join the global trade body, with which Moscow has been in talks since 1993.
"The end of 2002, or, more realistically, 2003 or 2004 are realistic (for Russia joining the WTO). This is the time when we are technologically ready to join," Kudrin said.
He said local businessmen should not worry about foreign competition after WTO entry as currently high import tariffs were rarely paid in full, meaning an effective import tariff rate coming in to budget coffers of 10-11 percent.
SOME PROBLEM AREAS
"We hope that as a result of negotiations we shall have, by the time we join the WTO, a level of no less than 11-12 percent, which means we shall retain the level of protection we have now," he said. He said the effective import tariff in the United States and the European Union was 3.5-4.0 percent.
However, he said the government planned to carry on with a policy of lowering import tariffs and to abolish them for types of machinery not produced locally.
Kudrin said there were problems in negotiating on the automobile, pharmaceutical and steel industries.
"I think we shall find a compromise," he said. "I think we shall be able to complete all negotiations by next summer."
He said there were no problems in banking as Russia had recently lifted restrictions on start ups by foreign banks and planned to transfer to international accounting by 2004.
"The situation is developing quicker than our banks are adjusting to the new conditions," he said. "Under the new conditions, about half of the banks will be able to sustain the requirements, including the capital sufficiency ratio."
But Andrei Kostin, chairman of Vneshekonombank, one of Russia's biggest banks, said only 10 percent of banks would be able to comply with the new requirements.
news.excite.com
3) This is the Crux of this posing
Bin Laden's grand miscalculation
By Tom Grant
Osama bin Laden, as best anyone can tell, wants Muslims to unite in a grand alliance, with him at its helm. The concept is not new. The British confronted the Mahdi in the Sudan in the 1890s, and this fanatic rebel, too, fancied himself a millenarian leader, bound to unify all believers under a banner of conquest and vanquish the infidel. The Mahdi in the Sudan failed, because, confronting the premier military and economic power of the day, his own forces were puny, and he lacked the means to recruit followers even to communicate his message beyond his immediate environs. Osama bin Laden in key respects is a far more dangerous and cunning opponent than this and other forebears. However, in an extraordinary irony, he and his cause could meet with an even more resounding defeat. Whether or not he forges a Pan-Islamic movement united against the West, bin Laden is near to triggering the establishment of an alliance far more fearsome than any conceivable alignment of Muslim countries. America, Russia, and China - a weight that indeed no other geopolitical combination whatsoever could withstand - may well and indeed should, on bin Laden's provocation, themselves join together in an alliance no less grand than the one he hopes to create.
The plan bin Laden has formulated to achieve his world-spanning aims involves a simple progression: commit acts of unbridled terror against America, causing America to retaliate against one or more Muslim countries and thus provoking Muslims into a single enraged community eager to elevate bin Laden to the status of messiah he so craves. The Saudi dissident has gone about his work with some cleverness. Take his manipulation of the media and opinion in the Muslim world. First, he has avoided public credit for the attacks of September 11, and polls show that most Arabs, ignoring the outrageousness of the proposition, believe that the United States itself orchestrated the devastation in Washington and New York, in order to furnish pretext for an attack on Muslims. Second, the US response, well-measured by objective and historical standards, is believed by most Arabs and many Muslims beyond the Arab world to constitute a terrific and bloody assault on millions of innocent civilians. So effective has this part of the bin Laden gambit been, that one suspects that if the United States did no more than send a politely worded note to Kabul requesting an apology, Near Eastern opinion nonetheless would hold that neo-crusaders had unleashed against Muslims a form of apocalypse. Thus the Muslim world, fuelled by false premises and gross exaggeration, lurches toward unity.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Colin Powell focuses on knitting together a hodgepodge of disparate countries to work alongside the US in rooting out terrorists. Great emphasis is placed on bringing multiple Muslim countries into the "alliance", even as it becomes ever clearer that some of the Muslim countries at the heart of Powell's planning contain such radicalized polities that their participation is mere fiction. Turkey, exceptionally, stands firmly with Washington, and Pakistan, though a powder keg of Islamic discontent, may yet fulfil its pledge of support. Beyond these countries, however - and even between the two of them, Pakistan remains a question mark - the situation is grim. To build the "alliance" that the United States now so emphasizes, it has had to find common denominators for all the states it aim to incorporate into it. Combining a welter of Arab and other Muslim states with various Western countries, themselves of widely varying resolve, makes for a geopolitical structure so loosely defined and unstable as to have no meaning at all. Bin Laden may well be creating a Muslim alliance of broad scope, focused on his own fanatical goals, whilst the alliance Washington has aimed thus far to build must remain a mirage.
Secretary Powell's alliance, while perhaps placating European fence-sitters, has little chance of serving any purpose in the actual combat that must ensue. The interests of the constituents of that mirage of an alliance are simply too varied and, moreover, their perceptions of the threat are too divergent for them to agree to meaningful action in concert. But three countries do share fundamental interests and, more importantly, do share similar perceptions of the threat. The US's leaders should recognize that the United States, Russia, and China are the logical alliance in the war against Islamic terror.
Americans on September 11, on their own territory, witnessed the fury of radical Islam. But Russia has confronted this problem for some time, and the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has upbraided the United States for failing to understand the nature of the problem his government confronts in Chechnya and other Muslim regions of the former USSR. China's leaders have shown little tolerance for religious movements of any stripe when these hint at challenge to the state. And China, though much further from the headlines, has also struggled with Islamic radicals. Chinese officials, for fear of assassination, have long dreading service in the western, Uighur-inhabited reaches of the People's Republic. That Chechen and Chinese Muslims have joined bin Laden at his camps in Afghanistan tightens the link.
Countries, absent a clear threat, very seldom have bound themselves together in pursuit of peacetime objectives. We should be careful before assuming that the multiple rounds of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) talks represent anything like the norm. Defense against a common danger, by contrast, has proved a prime mover in the creation of geopolitical alignments. It happened against Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler. Fear of communist encroachment kept the long-feuding states of Western Europe together even longer than in the past. To be sure, the risk of natural disasters, ranging from smallpox to ozone depletion, more recently has also produced broad-based cooperation, but these projects, though carried out in time of peace, are themselves essentially defensive.
The attacks of September 11 finally brought into focus that the world faces a new threat demanding concerted action. Not just isolated cells of suicidal holy warriors, but vast stretches of Muslim opinion have arrayed themselves in battle formation. Their goal is to destroy the international order as we know it, even though they can offer nothing to replace it. This enemy, then, follows in the footsteps of the very worst revisionists of the past. The response, just as in the past, must come, not from disparate minor players and the ranks of the revisionists themselves, but, rather, from the premier incumbent powers of our day. That is to say, the alliance against terror must center around the largest and most powerful members of the system that is now in peril.
America, Russia, and China, their differences notwithstanding, constitute the core of contemporary geopolitical incumbency. The position of America in this is clear enough, for our power and prosperity are unrivalled and radical revision of world order is never the vocation of the premier state in the international system. China has found a formula for political stability and economic growth at home and enhancement of diplomatic power abroad. The current trajectory, in most of its features, suits the People's Republic very well. It may appear that, of the three powers, Russia is the one least possessed of the attributes of incumbency. But to assume that Russia has less interest in preserving the current world order would ignore cardinal facts. Russia remains, in territorial extent, the largest state in the world. It possesses the first or second largest arsenal of thermonuclear weapons, along with the means to deliver them. Its resources are vast, and income from hydrocarbon exports is growing. Russia, like the United States and China, holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.
Herein lies the fatal flaw of bin Laden's strategy. He has declared his intent to revise the world order in radical ways. This is bound, at the very least, to put the incumbent powers on guard to protect their position. But bin Laden has done much more than that. By carrying out mass destruction on the very soil of the premier power and forming a support network that aids violent and disruptive Muslim radicals everywhere, he also threatens the domestic security of the incumbent powers. In this, his challenge is unlike that in the past when disaffected groups have tried to revise the way the world functions. The Mahdi at Khartoum did nothing to threaten Britons on their own shores. America, China, and Russia, by contrast, today face far worse than a disadvantageous reshuffling of international rank. Defeat in the present contest would not simply entail lowering our flags at distant outposts. The means our enemy has chosen to effect his desired reshuffling of international order imperils our very domestic order as well. Toward America, China, and Russia, then, bin Laden has posed a threat of unparalleled unifying potential. It is a double threat: to unseat them as international powers and to deny them tranquillity even at home. His scheme of alliance-building is quite simply in the process of backfiring on a scale of epic proportion.
The present motions of international diplomacy as led from Washington, DC, give only veiled indication of the emergence of a tripartite super-pact. But the forces of mutual interest and mutual perception of threat work their own logic. If the Islamic revisionists were to carry out more attacks against civilians on our own territories, then progress toward unified action amongst the three great powers might well prove inexorable. It may well be that unified action is about to happen in any event.
President George W Bush, meeting in Shanghai with his Chinese counterpart, President Jiang Zemin, appears to have obtained a meaningful commitment from China to fight terrorism. Perhaps more tellingly, the leaders agreed that there is a need to protect global stability. This begins to sound like incumbent powers at last recognizing the fundamental similarity of their interests in the face of a revisionist threat. Just as striking are recent words from Russia suggesting a willingness to accommodate the United States on missile defense and even on NATO expansion. It could be that the go-ahead from Moscow some weeks ago to permit American forces to deploy in the former Soviet territory of Uzbekistan signalled that the Russia-United States leg of the triad was already in place. It also bears noting that shortly after the Shanghai discussions between Bush and Jiang, Pakistan, a state over which China exercises considerable influence, increased its commitment to the war on terrorism by announcing that "alliance forces" would be using a major base in the west of the country.
Bin Laden has miscalculated. He may or may not yet prove able to foment a Muslim uprising of great breadth, but, by inadvertence, he seems to have made a far more potent alliance nearly inevitable. Only a strategic blunder even greater than his own will prevent the United States, China, and Russia from joining now in common cause to protect the order and security of which they uniquely are guarantors.
Tom Grant is the Warburg Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford University, United Kingdom.
atimes.com
In conclusion; what do we do if they all rise up, quoting the Author; "America, Russia, and China - a weight that indeed no other geopolitical combination whatsoever could withstand" No fear War breads strange bedfellows. One for all, and all for one, call them Global Giants the 3 Musketeers, and Kiss My German Ass! |
