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

To: TigerPaw who wrote (304956)	10/5/2002 11:29:04 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

What Israel and Jewish-American Israel-Firsters want from America! Israel views any possible threat from Iraq as a manageable risk, easily outweighed by the benefits of a US attack on that country. Indeed, it is one of the few things for which many Israelis are prepared to tolerate a temporary pause in the "complicating" persecution of the Palestinian people and what's left of their leadership. What could Israel hope to gain from such a war? First, Israel has for decades viewed Iraq, with its highly educated population and enormous natural wealth, as a potential military rival in the Middle East. Therefore anything that sets back Iraqi development is to be welcomed. Second, this Israeli government, like many of its predecessors, views bad relations between the Arab world and the United States as, by definition, good for Israel. Since it is certain that an American war against Iraq would considerably increase the already deep alienation between Arab and American societies, such a war is, in their minds, good for Israel. Thirdly, among a significant and growing minority of Israelis, the idea of "transfer"-- the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Israel and/or the Occupied Territories--is gaining ground among Jews and Christian Zionists. This gives rise to the legitimate fear that some in Israel's military leadership and government might see a war with Iraq, especially if it produces an Iraqi attack on Israel, as a golden opportunity to push a few hundred thousand Palestinians into neighboring countries. For some of Israel's supporters both within the US administration and the think tanks that feed it ideas, catastrophic developments even short of ethnic cleansing and the instability, chaos and violence that would ensue fit into a broader plan to completely remake an unruly Middle East with Israel as the dominant local power, under overall US hegemony. The most comprehensive vision is that of neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, who writes in the September 2002 issue of his journal Commentary that "changes in regime are the sine qua non throughout the region." The regimes "that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced," Podhoretz affirms, "are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as "friends" of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen." Podhoretz makes it clear that it is the United States that should do the overthrowing and replacing. Not content with merely changing nearly every government in the region by force, Podhoretz also hopes to bring about through this scheme "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam." In other words, what Podhoretz wants is truly a war of civilizations. For Islam to be purged of the elements to which neoconservatives like him object, the increased hatred and fanaticism and possibly September-11-style terror that the Iraq war might provoke some to commit are not undesirable side effects but the necessary pretext for aggressive American intervention which will succeed, "provided that the United States has the will to fight World War IV, 'the war against militant Islam" to a successful conclusion, and provided too, that we then have the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties." It is amazing that anyone would publish such ideas, and while there is no evidence that in this form they have caught on very far, there is evidence that ideas at least as dangerous have been brought from the cold of Washington's neoconservative think tanks into the heart of the Bush administration and are now directly informing US policy.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (304956)	10/6/2002 10:10:06 AM
From: Baldur Fjvlnisson	Respond to of 769670

Texas, I think Pres. Clinton is a bit of a sleazo. But he certainly has something called a heart which is sorely missed now that a war crazed wholly owned and totally bankrupt subsidiary of Enron Corp. and other leading concept scams is in power. Nasdaq fell 5% this week - but it's Bubba's fault. But still the Nasdaq is up something like 80% since Bubba came to office in 1993. Even after cratering 70% since election day 2000. Will they manage to drag out 30% of the electorate to vote for the rubber stamps? Where's the budget? Where are the programs to save and create valuable manufacturing jobs? When will Washington give up on this long ago bankrupt policy of systematically ignoring scams and disasters until they blow up in their faces? And then they play dumb. Is it possible to get a bit of leadership from this mess now that financial stocks are foretelling something real ugly? Take care, BF