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

To: Ilaine who wrote (51336)	10/11/2002 10:00:16 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

...and if the horse doesn't fly, we're in a better position. That's all I've said from the beginning. I don't read the thread all the time, so thanks for the background. I hope your interpretation is correct. There's a term, 'compellance,' (in international relations theory, I guess) and what you're proposing is that everything Bush has done from the beginning has been a sly and Machiavellian exercise in compellance. If that turns out to be the case, I'll truly take my hat off to the simpleton who can't learn to pronounce the word nuclear as he addresses the powerful of the world about a nuclear threat.

To: Ilaine who wrote (51336)	10/11/2002 10:05:59 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Can't remember the exact date but roughly August 10, it was leaked that the US had built a monsterously huge base in Qatar while nobody was looking. You and your dots. You might want to review this article from Nov. 2000. newyorker.com Lest you miss the dots you don't particularly want to see: This summer, Qatar became the principal staging area for American ground forces in the Gulf, with the completion of an enormous Pentagon-financed military facility in the eastern desert. It is the American Army Central Command's largest pre-positioning facility outside the continental United States, and was placed on the highest level of alert after the recent terrorist attack on the United States destroyer Cole, in Yemen. I visited the facility, situated an hour or so out of Doha, while its final completion was under way. There was nothing, not even a United States flag, to announce the American presence. Only after I had passed through a towering wall, protected by .50-calibre machine guns, did I come face to face with rows of dun-colored warehouses, constructed to house equipment for the nearly eleven thousand men who will make up an armored brigade and a division base. Already in place were more than a hundred and fifty tanks, a hundred and sixteen Bradley fighting vehicles, and a hundred and twelve armored personnel carriers. The presence of this weaponry in the Gulf is expected to cut the response time for American troop deployment from the United States from four weeks—as it was at the time of the Gulf War—to four days. The new facility is only one element of the Pentagon's presence in Qatar. Some thirty miles away is Camp Snoopy, from which United States military aircraft are sometimes deployed. And the Clinton Administration is currently negotiating with the Emir's government for the possible headquartering here of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Deep in the desert, toward the Saudi frontier, is the al-Udeid Air Base, a Qatari facility that Sheikh Hamad built at a cost of more than a billion dollars. Its runway measures fifteen thousand feet, and is the longest in the Gulf; its shelters will be able to accommodate nearly a hundred aircraft—far more than are needed by the Qatari Air Force, which has only twelve fighter planes.