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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (60659)	12/8/2002 11:29:31 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 281500

I think you are incorrect. I think it is about hegemony in the ME- at the very least it is about the hegemony of ideas- and Israel (and the US) don't have the right ideas. Our sympathy for many of our buds in the cold war was merely an "identity" thing- that is to say, we were only friends because they weren't communists. That "identity thing" is everywhere, from the Balkans to the US, and even in the ME. I can't blame them for using Islam as an identity thing. We use "Democracy"- and rather loosely. That's just my opinion, of course.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (60659)	12/8/2002 11:50:16 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I just watched a "60 Minutes" segment on how the Administration is "Selling" a war in Iraq to the American Public. What they went over is not new to any of us here, but how "60 Minutes" sold their viewpoint was interesting. Here is the summary of the show that is posted at CBS News.com >>>>Selling The Iraq War To The U.S. Politicians have had to sell the public on going to war since Colonial times, but they never had the arsenal of advertising and communications techniques the Bush administration is using to sell a possible war on Iraq. Bob Simon reports on those techniques and those employed by the elder Bush prior to the 1991 Gulf War Sunday, Dec. 8 at 7 p.m., ET/PT. Simon reminds viewers that a horrible story spread widely by the first Bush administration prior to the Gulf War about Kuwaiti babies pulled from incubators by invading Iraqis turned out not to be true. The current Bush administration may be also misinforming the public in its efforts to justify a possible second war with Saddam Hussein. One example of misinformation, according to physicist and former weapons inspector David Albright, was the Bush administration's leak to the media in September about Iraq's attempt to import aluminum tubes which administration officials claimed were headed for Iraq's nuclear program. "I think it was very misleading," says Albright, who directs the Institute for Science and International Security. Albright says the tubes could be possibly used for a nuclear program, but were more suited to conventional weapons production. Government experts thought that too, Albright tells Simon, but administration officials, were selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and, in essence, scare people. Simon's report examines the administration's use of Madison Avenue to produce an ad campaign aimed at improving the image of America in the Muslim world. He also interviews a former CIA agent who investigated the oft-mentioned report that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague several months before the deadly attacks on 9/11. Despite a lack of evidence that the meeting took place, the item was cited by administration officials as high as Vice President Dick Cheney and ended up being reported so widely that two-thirds of Americans polled by the Council on Foreign Relations believe Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11.<<<<<<<<<<<<<< As you can see, they set up the story with the Kuwait Baby bit, and then it was implied that all the things that the Administration had done since last August were of the same weight and caliber. " The Kuwait story was a lie, and so is everything you are being told now." You will notice that anything that might be positive about why we should take down Saddam was left out. In the "Aluminium Tube" part of the story, they spend the refutation time telling us that the tubes could have other uses. But they stayed away from telling us that "Yes, they could be used in Centrifuges to enrich Uranium." The key thing that got me was they kept referring on TV to the fact that the Arab world did not like our "Policies." What were the "Policies" that the Arabs didn't like? CBS never said. The reason they did not spell this out is obvious to those of us here, of course. It is our "Policy" toward Israel that the Arabs don't like. CBS did not want to point this out. There is one sequence I did like. It is the "Marketing" Program the State Department put together to "Sell" the USA to the Arabs. It is a series of commercials showing Muslims living in here and letting them say how much they love it here. As one Arab Spokesman pointed out, it is a great commercial for recruiting immigrants to come here, if that is what we want to do, but has nothing to do with what the Muslim World does not like about us.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (60659)	12/8/2002 11:56:58 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 281500

Israelis kill Palestinian mother.The Palestinian leadership reacted in anger, slamming the death as another example of Israel’s “state terrorism.” Aqel, 41, was killed in the street on her way to visiting neighbors for an Eid Al-Fitr holiday meal when troops opened fire with machine guns from a tank near the Jewish settlement of Rafah. www.arabnews.com By Nazir Majally, Arab News Staff GAZA, 9 December 2002 — Israeli troops killed a Palestinian mother yesterday and wounded three of her children as they walked through a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses said. Nahla Aqel, 41, was killed in the street on her way to visiting neighbors for an Eid Al-Fitr holiday meal when troops opened fire with machine guns from a tank near the Jewish settlement of Rafah. The Palestinian leadership reacted in anger, slamming the death as another example of Israel’s “state terrorism.” In a separate incident, two other Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire in Rafah, sources said. Earlier, under cover of heavy shooting, Israeli tanks and bulldozers moved around the refugee camp in Gaza where 10 Palestinians were killed in raids two days ago. Two Palestinian boys were slightly injured. Two tanks and a bulldozer were raiding a farm in Deir Al-Balah, not far from Bureij, the sources said. Officials at Al-Aqsa hospital said they were treating two Palestinian boys for minor gunshot wounds. At the same time, seven tanks and two bulldozers moved into farming areas of the Bureij camp, security sources and witnesses said. No injuries were reported in that lightly populated area. Israeli military officials said they had no information about tanks entering either location. In an escalation of tension on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, two soldiers were injured, one seriously, when their armored personnel carrier ran over a bomb yesterday while patrolling a security fence near Zarit. Also yesterday, five wanted Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank, four in Nablus and one in Sebastia, the army spokesman’s office said. No details were released. Palestinians reacted angrily to the setting up of a seemingly permanent army roadblock on the only open road linking the eastern and western halves of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city. The concrete roadblock was installed over the weekend, with the metal gate closed during curfews. Meanwhile, talks aimed at stopping “all operations against Israeli civilians” will resume within days between the Hamas and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, a Palestinian official said yesterday. “We are planning to have a meeting with Hamas in Gaza as soon as possible and talks in Cairo will take place next week at the most,” Minister for Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath told AFP. “We will maintain our demands, namely a halt to all operations against civilians as a first step toward a cease-fire to allow Israel to pull back its forces from the territories to the Sept. 28, 2000 lines,” before the Palestinian uprising erupted, he said. Shaath said civilians meant all unarmed and innocent Israelis, including unarmed settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shaath said the talks would also focus on “securing a commitment from Hamas to creating an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital within the 1967 borders only.” Hamas officially rejects the very existence of the state of Israel, although the group had previously said it would consider a temporary truce with the Jewish state in exchange for its full withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Cease-fire talks between Fatah and Hamas were held last month in Cairo, but yielded no result except a commitment from both sides to continue their dialogue. Shaath said he was optimistic for the next round of talks: “I had a meeting a few weeks ago in Damascus with Khaled Meshaal — Hamas’ political chief in exile — and felt quite optimistic we could reach an agreement.”