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

To: KLP who wrote (46994)	9/26/2002 12:12:02 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Some Arab authors "get it". From Amin al-Mahi, in al Hayat (published in London, naturally): "...In my personal opinion, no matter what peace proposal Clinton presented to the Arab side, it was sure to be rejected. This is because the Palestinian issue was always the main source of legitimacy for the revolutionary [Arab] regimes that established rural or tribal military republics. The Palestinian issue was always the subject of 'Announcement No. 1' of all these [Arab military coups]. More important, it was the prop for the war declared on democracy and modernization [by the Arab regimes], an eternal pretext for the bill of divorce from the free world and for imposing various laws, from emergency laws through military laws." "Since regional tensions, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, were one of the fronts of the Cold War, when the reorganization of the world began... the military (ex-revolutionary) Arab democracies suffered from pressure caused by this reorganization – for example, with the erosion of national sovereignty, the free market, the globalization of human rights, the [establishment of] international courts, and the rise of the era of the peoples. The Arab regime tried to create a kind of new Cold War, by forming an alliance with Islamic fundamentalism and establishing a new shadow empire in Central Asia." "The centers of tension, such as the Palestinian issue, [the war in] southern Sudan, and the friction in the Gulf, took the place of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, making it possible to man the barricades, to close themselves off, and to create polarization with the entire world... The situation became so extreme that these military republics allowed themselves to become royal houses, where political cloning was allowed through offspring." "Clinton's proposal was no more than a peace offensive against this Arab regime, and against its iron curtain in Palestine and southern Sudan. The aim [of this offensive] was to open the region to the changes of the post-Cold War era. It was a perfect American achievement and thus encountered cruel resistance, with no examination of what was good for the Palestinian people. When President Clinton left the White House, he took his proposals with him, leaving it to new tenants that do not believe [in his way]..." "Thus, Abu Ammar [Arafat] again turned the Palestinian people into a human shield protecting the Arab regime from the aggression of modernism and freedom. That is, he actually made the Palestinian issue revert to being an Arab [issue]. If only he would have settled for this – but he compensated political Islam for its humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and southeast Asia, for its bad reputation, and for its persecution throughout the entire world..." memri.org

To: KLP who wrote (46994)	9/26/2002 4:42:55 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi KLP; Re: "What on earth makes you think this....? Especially when people of both parties think the opposite?" It's a demonstrable fact that there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans who think the same as I do. Hell, people all over the world doubt that Iraq is a threat. Re: "How is terror of one sort the opposite of terror of another sort???" It's traditional US policy to ignore the actions of despotic nations when those actions are on the side of the United States. There are innumerable examples of this, the most important one for the case at hand being the fact that the US assisted Saddam Hussein at the same time that he was using the same WMD (poison gas) that the US now wants to throw him out of power for. At that time, Saddam was using it against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and since the US had a bone to pick with Iran, that use of terror by Iraq was considered okay. The situation has not significantly changed since then. Our real enemies, in the "war against terror" (which should more realistically be prosecuted as the "war against anti-American terror"), is still the Islamic fundamentalists, and we shouldn't complain too loudly when Saddam represses them in the south part of Iraq. Our real enemy is not Iraq, but is Iran, and by keeping Iraq down we are unnecessarily improving the situation of Iran and providing breeding grounds for terrorists in the regions of Iraq that Saddam's forces are kept out of. Re: "Do you suppose that each the US and the USSR held each other at bay with mutual weapon systems?" If by "mutual weapon systems" you mean "mutually assured destruction", then I'd say that it's not that simple. Neither side had sufficient conventional forces to defeat the other. So why start even a conventional war that would very likely end up as a bloody stalemate, perhaps leaving China to pick up the pieces. -- Carl