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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (7979)	2/13/2003 9:19:15 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Yes , we all know what the CIA did many years ago , and the reasons for it but you are not offering a comment to my question now , of the removal of the Taleban from power today ? WE can discuss the Bay of Pigs here too, but no longer relevant , seems this living in the past is what most of these arguments are over , but the real threat today remains clear. I assume your brother and you have been following Afghanistan of today? I do understand where the Islamic Fundamentalist are coming from very clearly , and one doesn't see many answers to the modern pan~arab problems which a wide and diverse interpretation of the sharia has offered to these countries so far . On the contrary , the conflicts and differences between all the various interretations of Islamic law has driven wedges and endless conflicts between these "Muslims" already for centuries . As did the wars in Christianity before, till finally reason and modern thinking prevailed , and religion was seperated from the state. Islam has no problems making war on itself I assure you , and dragging us all into it's morass with it. Thank you --->I will look up recent writings by Benard Lewis... I suggest you also read some of ---> Fouad Ajami's writings and commentaries as well...he's a professor at John's Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" . regards Mars

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (7979)	2/13/2003 9:26:01 PM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 25898

Here's one commentary of Fouad Ajami's last year on Palestine & Arafat that will give you some insight into his thoughts ...he's quite brilliant , (I would suggest all read if they want to wake up ffrom their own "dream palaces" in the sky) Fouad Ajami: Don't Let Arafat Distract Us, Arab despots threaten chaos. They're bluffing. The sky won't fall in Araby. Entrenched regimes, which have mastered precious little save the art of staying in power, will not be stampeded by the crowds who chant in support of Yasser Arafat. This is not a "crisis" of American foreign policy playing out in Ramallah, and reverberating in Amman, Cairo and Beirut. Instead of being alarmed, we should keep our focus on the campaign against terror. We do the Arabs no favor if we pick up the false trail of Arafat and let the new war against terror be trumped by old Arab obsessions with Palestine. The claim that there is "disarray" in American foreign policy--made by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who should know a thing or two about disarray--is fatuous. There is no conceivable American diplomacy on the Palestinian question that could still the furies of the jihadists. The policy of the Bush administration has been on the mark. Assertive and unyielding, it has pursued the monumental task of taking on the culture of terror--its infrastructure, its fronts, the whole intellectual and psychological edifice that justifies terror by virtue of a Palestinian alibi. Care should be exercised as we rush in to broker cease-fires: There is a whole Arab and Islamic world beyond Nablus and Arafat's compound in Ramallah. Primacy must still belong to the larger struggle to rid the Arab world of its malignancies, to thwart the jihadists and those who would cede them political ground. Arafat's game is transparent: He wishes to overwhelm Operation Enduring Freedom with his own war against Israel. And for his troubles, he seeks the rewards of days past. There shall come his way financial backing from Iraq and the Gulf states. (A commercial street in Baghdad has just been named for him.) And there shall be offered him and his people the false promise that the Arabs have offered Palestinians ever since the unfolding of their encounter with Zionism: that the cavalry is on its way, that demonstrators are about to set the world ablaze and come to the rescue of Palestine. The sad truth of history is that the Palestinians opted for pragmatism just once--when they broke with Arab legends and made peace at Oslo. Then, they returned to the world of nations, and secured a political turf of their own. The new storm is but a return to the old ways. In vast swaths of the Arab world, people know the truth of their condition but cannot utter it. Terror silences them. There is no deliverance, they know, if the cult of "martyrdom" is sanctified. There are beleaguered people who are eager for their world to be done with the furies of Islamism. The American victory in Afghanistan, and the promise that this new war has grander moral ambitions than the war that was fought against Iraq a decade ago, emboldened Arabs keen to retrieve the ground that religious and political radicalism had conquered. There is hope that there might be educational reform, and that radical preachers might be tamed. The Arab regimes that tell us that they are about to fall are conceding their own illegitimacy. The Arabs should be granted no special waiver from the imperatives of political reform--especially not by an America with its own quest for a just retribution against terror. For the good part of a decade, American policy averted its gaze from the malignant anti-Americanism at play in Arab lands, in pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. An American "Balfour Declaration" was granted the Palestinians by President Clinton, but the anti-American terror paid that diplomacy no heed. Yet we should know that there is quiet approval in Arab lands--among decent men and women who harbor no illusions about warlords and preachers of zealotry--of America's campaign against terror. Our pundits here or in Europe may have been troubled by the "axis of evil" remarks of President Bush, but there were many Arabs who savored the clarity. The crowds that have taken to Arab streets ought to be viewed with skepticism. The mind and the mood of a culture are difficult things to read. For all the public fury, a measure of introspection settled on the Arabs after Sept. 11: Those were their sons who had flown into those towers, those are their radical children on the run the world over. Psychologically, the protests over the troubles in Israel and the West Bank were an opportunity to escape the scathing judgments of others. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty: Why dwell on the terror of Mohamed Atta when there are other terrors? We can't impose a "settlement" of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle: That would be hubris. And we can't fall for the myth that Palestine is what ails Egypt, for example, or Iraq, and that al Qaeda's adherents are driven also by the passions of Palestine. We can't hold our own war hostage to Arafat's campaign of terror. That world is what it is, and we shall not be given a warrant for a strike against Iraq, or a reprieve from anti-Americanism, by accommodating Arafat or the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. There is a truth we should know: In the Arab world that beckons American power and hectors it at the same time, there are people terrified that the young men--and now young women--of terror may yet prevail. In the aftermath of victory in Afghanistan, these people saw prospects of deliverance. We owe them and ourselves fidelity to this new campaign. We need to reiterate to them that the truth of this campaign against terror holds in Netanya and Kabul, and that the way out of political ruin is an Arab break, once and for all, with the false consolations of terror. Mr. Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).

To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (7979)	2/13/2003 11:12:54 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

Boy, you sure avoided answering the question he asked. I wonder how come. >>what did/does your brother think of the forceful removal of the Taleban?<< My brother, who taught architecture in Afghanistan in the 70's, was very sorry to learn that the CIA supported the Taliban on the theory that this was the best defense against communism. OK, I think we gave support to everyone who was anti-Communist, including those who later formed the Taliban and those who were overthrown by the Taliban. What was the best defense against communism then?