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

To: jcky who wrote (35089)	7/27/2002 8:09:44 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If your point is to apply this "cloud-cuckoo" label to a category of people whose opinions are divorced from international reality then may I suggest you start with Bush2.0 Good evening, jcky. Thanks for the compliments. I think we can all differentiate between politicians who are making rhetorical points and professors expressing real surprise (he didn't sound facetious to me) that Israel would not leap at a Saudi proposal that it first withdraw to the 1967 borders, then it would be recognized in them (maybe), thus, in the professor's words "legimitizing" the existence of Israel inside the 1967 borders. This utter divorce from real-world power politics and international relations is what caused me to call Prof. D'Amato an inhabitant of cloud-cuckoo land, a reference to Aristophanes' The Frogs, in case you didn't catch it. Now, many other players on the world stage have misjudged their positions from time from time, but for coming out with pronouncements completely detached from time, space and history, no one can beat your real ivory tower idealist. I submit that Prof. D'Amato is an excellent case in point. Therefore I stick with the cloud-cuckoo land tag for him. None of your other examples are cloud-cuckooish. Bush is making rhetorical points based on a rather black and white world-view. The Palestinians are indeed nuts, but not in a idealistic way. The Israelis are a bad example, as the majority are quite realistic. Sharon himself says that a two state solution is now inevitable, and he says it consistently, even to Likudniks who are not happy to hear it. He just has no intention of handing that state into the mob rule of Yasser Arafat's PA, particularly while the Palestinians remain nuts. BTW, two states were not enough to create the Palestinian refugee dilemma, and they won't be enough to solve it. The dilemma was created by the surrounding Arab states all refusing to resettle the refugees (even though they had the abandoned houses of the Jews to settle them into) and insisting on keeping them in squalid camps on the UN dole for more than fifty years, the only such refugee population on earth. These states will have to help solve the refugee situation, since there won't be enough room in "Palestine" for them to return to, and Israel is not about to let them in.