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

To: JohnM who wrote (52291)	10/16/2002 5:35:01 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Black Heart, White Van By MAUREEN DOWD Columnist The New York Times October 16, 2002 ROCKVILLE, Md. — Chief Moose says he's looking for "closure." I wish he'd simply look for sniper. Closure is a chimera, if not a canard. And Fussy Charlie, who hates giving out any information about what he delicately calls "the situation," even whether the shooter's van is beige or white, makes one long for Dirty Harry. Chief Moose ludicrously objected that the Virginia police revealed Monday night that the sniper's white van had a faulty left taillight. He still seems to be coming to grips with the idea that we're in the era of instant communication, Amber Alerts and police scanners. Some freak has been driving around the Washington suburbs in a van popping people for two weeks and we still don't know much of anything. We know that Virginia's governor, Mark Warner, is bucking to be the Rudy Giuliani of the crisis; Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is trying to capitalize on her personal history with tragic gun killings to save her limp gubernatorial bid; Democrats in Congress tried to capitalize by rushing to pass a small-bore gun control measure that was going to pass anyway; President Bush and the G.O.P. are still taking dictation from the N.R.A. Ari Fleischer leaped from abstruse to absurd, explaining why the president opposes an urgently needed proposal for a computerized system of tracing bullets to gun owners: "Certainly, in the case of the sniper, the real issue is values." Certainly, in the case of the president, the real issue is N.R.A. cash for the G.O.P. An asphalt media jungle of little huts, reeking of popcorn and pizza, has been set up in the parking lot of Montgomery County Police headquarters. Asked yesterday at the midday briefing who was in charge of the sprawling investigation, an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms official replied, "This is a committee" — a response that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who knows how Washington works. The sniper has outsmarted the police. It takes just one minute for him to pull the trigger, once, and then hit the exit ramp and vanish. On Monday night it took the police 20 minutes to set up roadblocks on all the main highways in Virginia, causing gridlock for hours. But by then the sniper was probably already at home, savoring it all on TV. Now he will have to outfox Pentagon planes equipped with special sensors. The aircraft, used to chase drug lords in the jungles of Colombia, are coming to the capital. Usually, fear in this affluent grid of shopping malls and subdivisions focuses on whether the zoning regulations are strict enough and whether property taxes have been kept in check. One of the biggest fears here, pre-sniper, was getting caught in the terrible traffic jams. It is surreal that the sniper is the only one who's figured out how to navigate them. I was a reporter in Montgomery County for five years, when fracases among the fox-hunting set and sexually perverse dentists passed for big news. The most heinous case I covered was the Murder Most Fowl, when a golfer at Congressional Country Club became so infuriated by a honking goose that he bludgeoned him to death with his putter. In those days the top cop had an even more unfortunate name, Chief Crook. Americans, once insulated and carefree, are not used to being the hunted. Since 9/11 they have struggled with looking over their shoulders at unseen predators, with weapons both invisible and catastrophic, waiting for the next strike that the government assures us is coming. Celebrities had stalkers. But now average Americans have stalkers too, who might smash their lives while they are going about some mundane task like opening mail or pumping gas or shopping at Home Depot. Osama and Zawahiri still lurk, and Al Qaeda is still incinerating innocents. The anthrax killer, whose deadly letter was received by Tom Daschle's office a year ago yesterday, is still hovering. And now, running together with the fear of those invisible and diabolical fiends is the fear of a new invisible and diabolical fiend. The 11th victim, and ninth killed, was Linda Franklin, shot while loading her Home Depot purchases into her red convertible with her husband. She turned out to be a senior F.B.I. cyberterrorism analyst. That made her death an improbably tragic intersection between the foreign maniacs acting in God's name and a suburban maniac who says, "I am God." nytimes.com

To: JohnM who wrote (52291)	10/16/2002 5:38:35 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good column by Friedman in the NYT today. I will be interested to see if you agree. October 16, 2002 Campus Hypocrisy By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN [T] he Washington Post recently reported that students and faculty at a growing number of universities are pressuring their schools "into selling their holdings in companies that do business with Israel, prompting a counter-campaign among Jewish groups that consider the effort part of a creeping tide of anti-Semitism on campus." Here's what I would say to both sides on this issue: Memo to professors and students leading the divestiture campaign: Your campaign for divestiture from Israel is deeply dishonest and hypocritical, and any university that goes along with it does not deserve the title of institution of higher learning. You are dishonest because to single out Israel as the only party to blame for the current impasse is to perpetrate a lie. Historians can debate whether the Camp David and Clinton peace proposals for a Palestinian state were for 85, 90, or 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. But what is not debatable is what the proper Palestinian response should have been. It should have been to tell Israel and America that their peace proposals were the first fair offer they had ever put forth, and although they still fell short of what Palestinians feel is a just two-state solution, Palestinians were now prepared to work with Israel and America to achieve that end. The proper response was not a Palestinian intifada and 100 suicide bombers, which are what brought Ariel Sharon to power. It is shameful that at a time when some Palestinians are writing that they made a historic mistake in not nurturing the Clinton peace offer, pro-Palestinian professors and students in America and Europe pretend that the only reason the occupation persists is because of Israeli obstinacy. This approach will never gain the Palestinians a state, and those who dabble in it are simply prolonging Palestinian misery. You are also hypocrites. How is it that Egypt imprisons the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world, after a phony trial, and not a single student group in America calls for divestiture from Egypt? (I'm not calling for it, but the silence is telling.) How is it that Syria occupies Lebanon for 25 years, chokes the life out of its democracy, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Syria? How is it that Saudi Arabia denies its women the most basic human rights, and bans any other religion from being practiced publicly on its soil, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Saudi Arabia? Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction ? out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East ? is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest. Memo to Israel's supporters: Just because there are anti-Semites who blame Israel for everything that is wrong does not mean that whatever Israel does is right, or in its self-interest, or just. The settlement policy Israel has been pursuing is going to lead to the demise of the Jewish state. No, settlements are not the reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but to think they do not exacerbate it, and are not locking Israel into a permanent occupation, is also dishonest. If the settlers get their way, Israel will de facto or de jure annex the West Bank and Gaza. And if current Palestinian birth rates continue, by around the year 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza combined. When that happens, the demand of the college anti-Israel movements will change. They won't bother anymore with divestiture. They will simply demand: "One Man, One Vote. Since Israel has de facto annexed the territories, and there is now just one political entity between Jordan and the Mediterranean, we want majority rule." If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies. This is not a call for unilateral Israeli withdrawal. This is a call for everyone who wants Israel to remain a Jewish state ? and not become a binational state ? to urge President Bush to renew the U.S. push for a two-state solution. If you think the Bush team is doing Israel a favor with its diplomacy of benign neglect, if you think the only campaign Jews need to be involved in today is with hypocrites on U.S. college campuses ? and not with extremists in their own camp ? you too are telling yourselves a very big and dangerous lie.

To: JohnM who wrote (52291)	10/16/2002 6:19:12 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Mr. Bush, Heed Carter and Learn This prophet of war should look to his predecessor and give peace a chance. By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times October 15, 2002 Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for a career of successfully waging peace, beginning with the launching of a historic Mideast peace effort that President Bush is bent on scuttling with mindless indifference. Oblivious to the daily slaughter of Palestinians and Israelis, whose televised mayhem fuels evil passions throughout the Islamic world, Bush focuses instead on the irrelevant sideshow of Iraq. Bush seems unaware that the Gordian knot of global terrorism pulled tightly in years past by our allies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- in ugly evidence again this weekend in peaceful Bali -- will not be cut unless the quest for peace initiated by Carter at Camp David nearly a quarter-century ago is finally completed. Instead, in a stunning display of willful pique more akin to a child's tantrum than to a president's policy, Bush seeks to smite Iraq as a target more accessible to his sword. In fact, in a brief period of less than two years an accidental president untutored in the ways of the world has surrendered the presidency to a gang of bullies in his administration that seeks to rearrange the world to its liking, not through diplomacy and peaceful example but rather through the ravages of what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, writing in his just- released personal cheat sheet to determine when to invade other countries that have not attacked us, politely calls a "pre-crisis" use of force. Rumsfeld and fellow prominent administration chicken hawks like Dick Cheney and Paul D. Wolfowitz are veterans not of combat but rather of wars they had foolishly suggested others fight. Over the protests of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired general, these men have successfully installed a blatantly imperialist foreign policy. To be sure, there are polls that show a slim majority of Americans support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, setting aside the fact that 90% of Americans would probably support the violent overthrow of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, these numbers are extremely misleading. If other elements are factored into the polling -- should we wait for allied support, should we give the U.N. more time for diplomacy, for example -- a majority of us oppose Bush's first-strike approach. Americans don't like to concern themselves too much with what's happening in the rest of the world, and many are even content to let the CIA and the Marines dabble in international behavior modification as long as the body bags don't pile up too high. But Americans also pride themselves on common sense, and they know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, the woes of the economy or our inability to locate Osama bin Laden, the anthrax terrorist or even the Washington-area sniper. They know that oil is black gold and Iraq has a whole heck of a lot of it, but they also know that nation-building is a dangerous, costly and ultimately thankless task better left to the United Nations. Of course, Americans are concerned about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, especially now that our national sense of invulnerability has been so painfully damaged. Many, however, are starting to realize that the Bush administration's claims on that front need to be treated with a grain of salt the size of the hats in Texas. The CIA has concluded that Iraq does not have nuclear weapons and is militarily far weaker than it was 10 years ago, but the response of the administration has been to squeeze the intelligence agency to come up with reports that support its unsupportable case for invasion. And how insulting to our collective intelligence is it to have the president hold up photos of dangerous weapons sites that are found to be piles of junk by American journalists who visit the location days later? Clearly the president is eager to derail the return of U.N. weapons inspectors for fear they won't find much. Meanwhile, Pakistan dictator Pervez Musharraf, who has a tested, deliverable nuclear arsenal, has just managed to lose an election that he unsuccessfully rigged, leaving Islamic fanatics in control of the country's most sensitive region, that which borders Afghanistan. The religious fundamentalists exploited a slogan stating that Bush's plan to attack Iraq transforms the war on terrorism into a war on Islam. That is exactly the problem with Bush's obsession with Iraq. Whether to avenge his father or to "wag the dog" ahead of elections, Bush has undermined the lofty goal of eliminating terrorism. While Carter has exhibited the patience of the peacemaker, a sweet Jesus for our time, willing to rebuke contemptible leaders while offering them a path for redemption, Bush has become a self-fulfilling prophet of war, delighting in the discovery of what he defines as immutable evil, thereby justifying an endless crusade against the infidels. latimes.com