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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (32142)	6/11/2002 5:34:20 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

In the past, and through his words and actions, Barak helped to set in motion the process of delegitimizing the Palestinians and the peace process, thereby enabling Ariel Sharon to deal with them as he saw fit This gets to the core of the current conflict of perceptions. Can one speak of an "peace process" that co-exists with the suicide bombers of the intifada? Barak, Sharon, and the majority of the Israeli people say NO, this terrorism is unacceptable (unlike the Europeans, when they say 'unacceptable' they really mean they won't accept it). Arafat, Agha and Malley and the majority of the Palestinian people say YES, therefore they accuse Barak of "delegitimizing" a peace process which to Israeli eyes is utterly defunct.

To: JohnM who wrote (32142)	6/11/2002 6:16:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Just read the NY Review of Books piece. Not surprisingly, I think that Agha and Malley do not have the facts on their side so they are resorting to insults -- "demagoguery" and the like. People who talk about the "indiscriminate [Israeli] attacks of the past months" (without any mention of the truly indiscrimate nature of the Palestinian campaign) should not be too hasty to accuse others of demagoguery imo. Whatever one thinks of these various positions, it's fair now to say that any given interpretation and almost any given restatement of "the facts" is contested No, Agha and Malley have a problem there, as the central fact of Barak and Morris' argument is not contested. That is that Barak made an offer at Camp David that bettered previous Israeli offers by a considerable distance, and this was upped by Clinton to net 97% of the territories, sovereignty over Arab E. Jerusalem, end of occupation, most settlements gone. Barak agreed to this but Arafat did not. So Agha and Malley must argue around the edge. Palestinian negotiators did make counter-offers, were willing to cap refugee returns. Yes, say Barak and Morris, but Arafat didn't agree to their proposals. Agha and Malley say, the Israeli negotiators did that too, but don't offer a single instance. Then there are the various circumstantial arguments, the timing was bad, etc. Some of these may be so but it doesn't really make the case.

To: JohnM who wrote (32142)	6/12/2002 12:20:56 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Michael Kelly says, "Take that, you Liberals!" washingtonpost.com It Is a War, After All By Michael Kelly Wednesday, June 12, 2002; Page A31 "The FBI is now telling the American people, 'You no longer have to do anything unlawful to get that knock on the door. You can be doing a perfectly legal activity like worshiping or talking in a chat room and they can spy on you anyway.'-- Laura Murphy, of the American Civil Liberties Union, as quoted in The Post May 30. Murphy was referring specifically to new rules promulgated by the FBI that will give federal investigators far greater latitude than in the past to monitor -- oh, all right, spy upon -- private conversations in such venues as libraries, Internet sites and religious institutions. But her complaint may be taken beyond its specifics as a fair example of a rising chorus of worry and woe concerning the threat to civil liberties posed by the increasingly hard-nosed security measures being adopted by a nation at war. We have not heard the last of Ms. Murphy on this subject. There is not much in life that is certain, but one thing we can be sure of is that the creation of a $37 billion, 22-agency, supercolossal Department of Homeland Security will not usher in a new era of civil liberties sensitivity, and that the ACLU will find this objectionable. As traditional as the cries from the once-again-wounded hearts of once-again-outraged liberals is the governmental response in such circumstances: It isn't so. No liberties are at risk, or not much anyway. All safeguards are being taken. This administration stands second to none in its concern for the sacred rights of all Americans, etc. The whole thing is ritual. When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced new regulations requiring the fingerprinting and photographing of foreign visitors from all nations deemed to harbor anti-American terrorism, Sen. Ted Kennedy was, of course, "deeply disappointed" in a plan that would "further stigmatize innocent Arab and Muslim visitors." White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was of course quick to assure that President Bush was acting "fully in accordance with protecting civil rights and civil liberties." Would it be too much to ask that we cut this out? The United States is at war -- its first utterly unavoidable war since World War II and its first war since the Civil War in which the enemy has been able to significantly bring the conflict onto American soil. This war must be successfully prosecuted, and success in war pretty much always requires the violation of civil liberties. As a generally liberties-minded friend notes, war in itself constitutes the grossest imaginable violation of liberties. In war, the state may choose to say to its citizens: We are exercising our collective right to deprive you of the most fundamental of your individual rights -- your liberty and quite possibly life (don't even mention your pursuit of happiness). We are taking you away, putting you in a uniform, subjecting you to a wholly dictatorial order -- and we are sending you off to very likely die. If you run away, we will ourselves shoot you. The proper response to complaints such as those voiced by Murphy and Kennedy is: Yes, it is true, this action will indeed hurt or at least insult some innocent people, and we are sorry about that. And this action does represent an infringement of the rights and liberties enjoyed not just by Americans but by visitors to America, and we are sorry about that, too. But we must do everything we can to curtail the ability of the enemy to attack us. This is necessary. Right now, there sits in a jail cell an American citizen named Abdullah al Muhajir, formerly Jose Padilla. He was arrested at O'Hare International Airport on a sealed warrant after arriving on a flight from Zurich May 8. He is accused, based on what is believed to be credible intelligence, of plotting to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States. He was seized as a material witness and has not been charged with a crime, apparently because the U.S. government does not think it possesses evidence sufficient to charge him. Instead, he is being held as "an enemy combatant," which means the U.S. military can keep him locked up for as long as it wants, with no jury trial. No one outside the government really knows what the evidence is against al Muhajir. The government didn't even reveal his arrest until a scheduled court hearing forced the revelation. Now, that is what I call a violation of civil liberties. I am sorry about it, and I will be even sorrier in the unlikely event that al Muhajir is innocent and should not have been locked away. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

To: JohnM who wrote (32142)	6/12/2002 4:20:42 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

"Do-Gooders of the world, Unite!" Here is an article on rebuilding Afghanistan by two members of "Refugees International," who are convinced that no one can rebuild a country without massive Foreign Aid and these two, with their cohorts, to tell the people what to do. When you read what the poeple of Afghanistan are doing , and then contrast it with what they think has to happen, it is really a shocker. "Nanny knows best!" washingtonpost.com The Next Afghan Crisis By Larry Thompson And Michelle Brown Wednesday, June 12, 2002; Page A31 Every morning hundreds of overcrowded, battered, wildly painted buses and trucks gather on a dusty plain near the frontier city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Platoons of workers for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) register the new arrivals -- Afghan refugees heading home -- and send them on their way to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. The refugees carry their meager worldly goods with them. Among their most valuable possessions are wooden poles, beams and window frames. The refugees have torn down their mud-brick houses in Pakistan to salvage the wood. Wood is expensive, and wooden poles to frame a new house are worth carrying home. The return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran is one of the largest, fastest migrations in history. In less than three months, UNHCR has counted 920,000 returnees. Add to that hundreds of thousands of unrecorded returnees and displaced persons and the number of Afghans going home adds up to well over 1 million. Three million or more Afghan refugees are still living in Iran and Pakistan, so the mass migration may continue for many more months -- provided that Afghanistan continues to enjoy relative peace and offer economic opportunity. That's the rub. Refugee returnees crossing the border from both Pakistan and Iran are optimistic. But we visited villages full of returnees near Bamyan -- famous for the huge standing Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban -- with economic prospects amounting to near zero. They are living in tents, awaiting materials from the UNHCR and other aid agencies to build new homes from the ruins of their villages. A surprisingly large number of the returnees -- about 40 percent -- are coming to the overcrowded and war-ravaged capital city of Kabul. We met many young Afghan men coming back from Iran. They are urbanized factory and construction workers, dressed in clothes that might have come from Wal-Mart, and they are going to Kabul. Will they find work? And what will be their social impact on Afghanistan? The United Nations had planned for the return of 800,000 Afghans in 2002 -- a number already exceeded. The aid agencies are under extraordinary pressure to keep up with the needs of the returnees and their communities. The billions of dollars in aid pledges made in the euphoria of the fall of the Taliban government have not yet come through. UNHCR is $92 million short of its $271 million budget for Afghanistan in 2002. The World Food Programme has had to cut back on its food distributions. The U.N. Development Program, while providing policy advice to the new Afghan government, still does not have the okay of the government and the support of donors to become fully operational. Politics, of course, plays its part. A loya jirga -- the traditional Afghan version of a representative assembly -- is meeting to set the future course of Afghan government. Whether its decisions will be perceived by the Afghan people as positive or negative will have an enormous impact on refugee returns, development programs and, indeed, the future of the country. Afghanistan is perhaps the most difficult reconstruction of a country ever undertaken by the international aid community. The great fear is that it will slip back into ethnic-related civil war or will remain economically prostrate and the refugees now going home will remain wards of the international community -- or become refugees again. Moreover, the humanitarian crisis caused by drought in Afghanistan is not over yet. Although the prospects for increased agricultural production in much of the north are better this year than last, southern Afghanistan remains locked into a catastrophic drought. Large amounts of food aid will be necessary for at least another year. The Bush administration sees the crisis in Afghanistan as fundamentally a political and military one in the context of the global war on terrorism. It is certainly that. But it is also a humanitarian crisis. To date, the international response to the political and military crisis has been swift, the response to the humanitarian crisis much less so. Further delay in emergency and reconstruction assistance will put lives at risk and threaten the political stability of the country. The international community, led by the United States, must fulfill its promise to the Afghan people. Larry Thompson and Michelle Brown are with Refugees International.

To: JohnM who wrote (32142)	6/12/2002 6:47:02 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Speaking of reading, let's read about math! Whatever happened to Jaime Escalante? Stand and Deliver Revisited The untold story behind the famous rise -- and shameful fall -- of Jaime Escalante, America's master math teacher. By Jerry Jesness Thanks to the popular 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, many Americans know of the success that Jaime Escalante and his students enjoyed at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the 1980s, that exceptional teacher at a poor public school built a calculus program rivaled by only a handful of exclusive academies. It is less well-known that Escalante left Garfield after problems with colleagues and administrators, and that his calculus program withered in his absence. That untold story highlights much that is wrong with public schooling in the United States and offers some valuable insights into the workings -- and failings -- of our education system. rest of story at reason.com