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

To: LindyBill who wrote (35124)	7/28/2002 8:22:29 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Um, that was the Queen's Navy, wasn't it, LB? One more point to lend support to your arguments. Informed observers agree (Zakaria is the name that comes formost to mind) that containment is breaking down rapidly. They estimate that Saddam's revenues have increased fourfold lately, in large part due to Syrian assistance. So if it ever was working, it's not now. I would also like to comment on those commentators who dismiss the neocon's line "The road to Jersusalem is through Baghdad and Tehran" as raving pro-Sharon policies. It seems to me that the neocons who propose this are addressing a real set of problems that their critics are not acknowledging, to wit - The US is so powerful that we cannot easily stay out of conflicts even where we have no direct national interest; the world demands that we 'do something', as they are now doing in Kashmir. I would have certainly thought that we had no dog in that fight, but now that we're in Pakistan all bets are off. - The US has wasted a lot of political capital trying to solve the Mideast mess, which does affect us. The efforts failed, in large part because the surrounding Arab states wish the conflict to continue, since their governments derive no small benefit from it. This is quite apart from the positions taken by Arafat or successive Israeli governments. - The failure to resolve the Mideast mess, both Israel/Pal and Saddam's successful clinging to power, has cost the US political clout and 'awe' in the Mideast. Our perceived weakness, exacerbated by our failure to respond effectively to previous terrorist attacks on our forces, emboldened Al Qaeda and paved the way for Sept. 11th. - Now that we are overtly threatening Baghdad again (in an effort to recover our political clout), the pro-Saddam anti-US coalition is using the Israeli/Pal conflict as a shield, adding fuel to the fire while screaming, you must resolve Palestine first! Iran and Syria are leading this game. It seems imho that these four points are not really in contention. Have you seen anybody who disagrees with them? The neocons have at least a program to address them. A program strongly opposed by the State Department and the CIA. What I have not seen from State or the CIA is their ideas of how to address these problems; they just propose more of what we've been doing, which is how we got into this mess. State's grand Mideast program, the US-Saudi alliance, has certainly delivered a big fat zero to us in the crunch.