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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (240756)	3/21/2002 10:14:55 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Respond to of 769670

What Cheney learned on his Mideast tour By Henry Precht WASHINGTON – Vice President Cheney seems to have failed in his hurried mission of instructing Middle Eastern leaders on the need for military action to bring down Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But the trip succeeded admirably in teaching him five basic lessons about the region today: • The Israel-Palestine conflict is central to the politics of Arab states. Their leaders are convinced that the course and outcome of the struggle could well determine their futures. • A cease-fire in the conflict is meaningless unless there is a political context of hope. Palestinians are fighting for freedom from occupation; Israelis are retaliating to achieve security. At present, neither freedom nor security is in sight. • The peace plan of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah offers the best hope for the peace and security that normal people, not the ideologues, earnestly desire. This plan calls for a return to 1967 Israeli borders in exchange for fully normalized relations with all Arab states, closing most Jewish settlements, and dropping the right of all pre-1948 refugees to return to their homes in Israel. • The bitterness of prolonged violence and the absence of hope for peace push extremists on both sides to the fore, making it impossible to believe the two parties can come together in a spirit of conciliation and compromise. • Both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will respond to US pressure when it is firmly applied and when their situations are desperate. Evidence: first, Mr. Sharon's agreement to pull his troops out of reoccupied Palestinian areas and easing of sanctions on Mr. Arafat, and, second, Arafat's sincere – if futile – call for an end to violence. This last lesson is the most basic one, for it rests on earlier teachings from the history of the conflict as well as on current realities. In the past, Israel has made concessions to its Arab enemies only when pressed by Washington or by those enemies. It withdrew forces from the Sinai Peninsula on three occasions when Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Carter demanded it. Israel ended an incursion into Lebanon when Carter insisted, and withdrew completely under pressure from Hizbullah. It stopped (temporarily) settlement activity when the first President Bush withheld housing loan money. The Oslo accords of 1993 – which set a framework for talks between Israel and the Palestinians – were the result of years of fighting in the first intifada. Now the Israeli economy has tanked, registering negative growth after the destruction of tourism and investment by the second intifada, plus the collapse of the Nasdaq in the US, which hit Israel's technology sector. On top of this fiscal/political disaster, the extraordinary expenses of fighting Palestinians will be a heavy burden. Who will pay it? Don't be surprised if Israel sends Washington a request soon for supplemental aid. Arafat's Palestinian Authority is even more vulnerable after months of intifada destruction and years of mismanagement and corruption. He is desperate for a resolution to the conflict, but will not settle for terms – such as those at the last Camp David talks, in 2000 – that do not give him a viable state. This is, therefore, the moment for the careful application of pressure by Washington for a lasting settlement, along the lines of the Abdullah plan. America should not wait for an elusive ceasefire, but instead assemble a broad coalition of allies from Europe and the Middle East to share in the labor of pushing the combatants toward the only feasible end to the conflict. The coalition could also provide peacekeeping forces to separate the parties. Neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian rulers can resist such pressure, and most of their constituents will gratefully accept it. It is time for the Bush administration to app

To: 10K a day who wrote (240756)	3/21/2002 10:47:24 PM
From: Dan B.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "if the chinese can pay their workers 30 cents an hour and make a go of it...I say more power to them... Isn't that what this free market stuff is all about..." NO. That is just your shallow understanding talking. Re: "I guess they just have to decide if they want to have a steel industry in 10 years" NO. Unless you'd like to adopt, say perhaps, the former Soviet Union's planned economy. It worked SO well for them, I hope you find a nice place trying it all again, and move here, ggg. But maybe your implication is right, maybe we should bail out EVERY status quo unionized(or otherwise) industry for ever and ever. And for this war concern, we could have our government subsidize the capacity we need for our war machine. Perhaps a better solution than tariffs. At least direct purchasers could still buy lower cost steel, and of course no unionized steel jobs would need be lost. And for the sake of jobs, we could have started protecting jobs either of these ways long ago. Who would worry about work if we had fewer job losses over the decades...just think, we could still have a robust abundance of products on the shelves, like buggy-whips, and....mechanical meat grinders...and..and...and.. Oh shoot, freedom works, Dan B