Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (11425)	12/5/2001 12:43:20 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Jack Kemp December 5, 2001 Straight talk on Iraq The obsession of some members of the press and the political establishment to attack Iraq right now is disturbing. It is weird that they would divert precious resources from the war on Islamic terrorists, the more serious and immediate threat, in order to settle old scores with our Gulf-War nemesis, Saddam Hussein. We have yet to turn up conclusive evidence that Hussein harbors or assists Al-Qaeda terrorists or that he has forged a long-distance alliance with Al-Qaeda to wage war on America. Using Sept. 11 and subsequent anthrax attacks as pretexts for settling old scores with Iraq would undermine the war effort. It would play into bin Laden's hands, turning a focused war against the Islamic terror network into a much wider conflict with the Arab and Muslim world that our European allies and even Turkey could not support. Desirable as it would be to see the Iraqi people liberated from Hussein's tyranny, it is not necessary to force him from power in order to neuter him as a threat to our country or the region. Former President George Bush was right to stop the Gulf War upon achieving the alliance's stated aim of throwing Iraq out of Kuwait rather than changing the objective and driving all the way to Baghdad and deposing Hussein. The United Nations was correct to impose sanctions on Iraq to force it to destroy its stock of chemical and biological weapons and its capacity to produce any more chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The real problem with the sanctions began in 1995, when the head of the U.N. inspection team said Iraq was 95 percent "disarmed," and disagreement arose over how to verify the remaining 5 percent. By 1997, the head of the U.N. inspection team at that time, Scott Ritter, said that as far as chemical and biological weapons were concerned Iraq was fully "disarmed" and posed no threat to rest of the world. Iraq argued that it had fully complied with U.N. Resolution 687 and demanded that the sanctions be lifted. Had Bush remained in office, he would have worked through these problems, gained the access we needed to find anything else or convince ourselves nothing else existed and lift the sanctions. Instead, President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, committed one of the biggest foreign policy blunders since the Bay of Pigs when they allowed spies to be infiltrated into the U.N. inspection team and took it upon themselves to raise the bar on Iraq, making the lifting of sanctions contingent on Hussein's ouster. They transformed sanctions from a diplomatic tool with a precise and obtainable objective into a blunt instrument of pain to inflict punishment on innocent Iraqi civilians, removing any incentive Hussein might have had to cooperate and destroying any chance we had to keep tabs on him. We are still paying for the Clinton/Albright blunder. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell are right to try to get U.N. inspectors back into Iraq, and they have an opportunity to undo the enormous damage done by Clinton and Albright so that the terms of U.N. Resolution 687 can be implemented fully. If Iraq refuses this reasonable approach, then would be the proper time to consider military options. Nuclear inspections continue in Iraq to this day within the framework of Iraq's participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In January, the IAEA carried out a verification of the nuclear-weapons-usable material still remaining in Iraq. With the co-operation of the Iraqi authorities, IAEA inspectors were able to verify that Iraq was in full compliance with the terms and conditions of Iraq's Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards and security agreement, which are less restrictive than U.N. Resolution 687. The IAEA says that if it could reenter Iraq and satisfy itself that the status of other nuclear activities forbidden by U.N. Resolution 687 had not changed since U.N. inspectors left in 1998, then the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification plan required by U.N. Resolution 687 could be fully implemented. Can we be sure of this? Of course not. Practically speaking we can't be absolutely sure of anything. But we surely did succeed ultimately in containing the Soviet Union, a far bigger threat, and there is no reason we can't do the same to Hussein. I have a suggestion for the Iraqis: Cool the rhetoric, stop shooting at our airplanes, publicly announce that you are prepared to undertake specific steps to assist the allies in the war against terrorism, request a meeting with the Bush administration to get U.N. inspectors back into Iraq and establish the terms on which sanctions can be lifted. I would urge the Bush Administration to continue efforts to get U.N. inspectors into Iraq and reaffirm U.N. Resolution 687 as the basis of U.S. policy toward Iraq, not the Clinton/Albright doctrine that keeps sanctions in place no matter what Iraq does. ©2001 Copley News Service townhall.com

To: calgal who wrote (11425)	12/5/2001 12:43:50 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

Pat Buchanan December 5, 2001 Israel's remaining options...and ours Whether the slaughter of 26 Israelis was a reprisal for Israel's assassination of a Hamas leader or an attempt to kill President Bush's peace initiative, it has succeeded. With Israelis justifiably enraged, peace negotiations are off the table. And given the revulsion felt by Americans at what those suicide bombers did, Bush is not going to be pressuring Ariel Sharon to trade "land for peace," any time soon, with Yasser Arafat. Was Arafat responsible? Probably not, for he is the big loser. His hopes of reviving the Oslo "peace process" and his dream of being the first president of a Palestine recognized by the United States were blown to pieces along with those Jewish teen-agers. Could Arafat have halted the attacks? Again, probably not. He seems no more capable of anticipating and aborting the suicide bombers than is Ariel Sharon. But things perceived as real are real in their consequences, and the perception that Arafat is responsible for the massacres is going to have consequences. Whether the Palestinian Authority is crushed, expelled or shunned by Israel, it is probably all over for Arafat. But as the Israelis slam the door in Arafat's face, charging him with moral complicity in mass murder, they will have to review their options, and so will we. In researching a new book, "Death of the West," I came across some U.N. population statistics that are riveting. At present birth rates, the 4.2 million Palestinians inside Israel and on the West Bank and in Gaza will explode to 9 million by 2025 and 15 million by 2050. With no Palestinian state, Israelis will be out-numbered 2-1 by the Arabs they rule. Demography is destiny, and these figures leave Israel several options. Israel can push the Palestinians across the Jordan, as Meir Kahane urged – a crime against humanity America and the world would condemn. Israel can corral them in bantustans in a rump state policed by the army, which entails endless intifadas. Israel could annex the West Bank and make the Palestinians citizens, but they would vote to abolish a Jewish state. Israel can control the West Bank forever and not make its residents citizens, but then she would cease to be democratic. Israel can build a wall around the country. But any wall would have to enclose all Jerusalem, and no Arab nation would recognize such borders. Also, Israel's army would have to patrol the Jordan River and the Egyptian border in Gaza, and undertake permanent policing to defend settlements in such places as Hebron. Each of these five options seems to guarantee permanent war with the Palestinian people. Yet, the longer this war goes on, the less likely Israel is to prevail. After 18 years, Hezbollah triumphed over mighty Israel in Lebanon. And over the next 25 years, Israel's population is expected to grow by only 2.1 million, with half of that among her Arab minority. Meanwhile, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are together expected to add 62 million people. A decade ago, the soldier-statesman Yitzhak Rabin concluded: No Palestine, no peace. As did Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier, who decided that a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital was a necessary condition of peace. Were both these Israeli prime ministers wrong? Sharon believes they were – that time is on his side, that a hard policy will lead to Arafat's replacement by pliable Palestinians who will accept his terms. But two intifadas have produced the opposite, elevating Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while pushing the Palestinian Authority toward irrelevance. Arafat is no picnic, but if Hamas and Islamic Jihad are the alternatives, who is the moderate? And what of America? So long as the United States provides Israel with the weapons and money to crush intifadas, expand settlements and postpone the coming of a Palestinian state, our reputation in the Middle East is in the custody of Ariel Sharon. If Bush cannot put distance between us, America will end up with all his enemies and only his friends. The president is in a box. In his political coalition, those who care most about the Middle East are adamant that he stand squarely with Sharon and anathematize Arafat as a terrorist. For Bush, the test of leadership is not whether he can pressure Arafat, but whether he can declare his and our independence of Ariel Sharon. If he cannot, and if we allow Sharon to make his war our war, he will decide our fate and future in the Middle East. Is this acceptable to us all? Or is it time for Bush to lay out to the world, in explicit terms, what he believes is a just, honorable and attainable peace? For if we do not break this present cycle of atrocity followed by assassination followed by atrocity, all of us – Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Americans – are going down in the maelstrom. townhall.com