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

To: NickSE who wrote (78006)	2/26/2003 11:22:45 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Restrictive Arab Nations Feel Pressure From Within washingtonpost.com CAIRO, Feb. 26 -- After the Arab world's half-century of independence, democracy remains elusive and distant. Few Arab leaders have tolerated challenge to their rule or relinquished power voluntarily. But the entrenched political order is under increasing pressure from popular demands for economic improvement and more openness in the age of satellite television and the Internet, according to a wide range of analysts, activists and diplomats. Few predict a wave of democratization is about to be unleashed in the Arab world. Even fewer predict the United States will be an agent of that change, or that a war in Iraq will help bring it about. These analysts and officials said the Arab world remains knotted by unresolved questions about rulers and the ruled: Whether governments obsessed with stability will willfully give room to dissent, what compromises they will make with mainstream Islamic groups that pose the only real opposition, and what role the United States will play. "People in the Arab world now really live in a kind of frustration between the behavior of the regimes and the behavior of the United States," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "There's a great risk of radicalization -- for the Islamic movement and for ordinary people -- that lies within those contradictions." [cont'd...]

To: NickSE who wrote (78006)	2/26/2003 11:39:43 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<MOAB....similar to a small nuclear weapon> This is another unsettling trend, the convergence of conventional and un-conventional weapons. There has been a lot of work done, to make nuclear weapons smaller, tailored for specific tasks, more "useable". It is theoretically possible to make biological weapons that disable or kill those who come in contact with them, but are not infectious. A limited, surgical, more "useable" biological weapon. Once the distinction between WMD and "economy-size conventional weapons" gets blurred, it will be that much harder to convince regional powers not to get and use them. <one important aspect of using this type of weapon, sources say, will be psychological impact on enemy troops> How about the psychological impact on 200 assorted Prime Ministers and Presidents, who say, "Gotta get me one of those". Small nuclear weapon, indeed.