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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (93798)	4/16/2003 1:50:14 AM
From: mightylakers	Respond to of 281500

Democracy works, in the places where it works Ditto on that. Thank you for the well thought out post. When people use their own mindset to gauge others, something, sometimes a lot of things get lost. It is hard for an American to imagine how can a person live in an environment where questioning the government is not allowed, but a common folk from a common poor country may just wonder how many pennies is that "right" worth. The world is not moving at the same speed from the same starting point. Just like you have billionaires and homeless. Yes Saddam is an evil, but I don't think his foes are Angels either, some of them look like an Angel because they lost their bid to be an evil. Saddam is just a name of a man, a man who beat out the others in their quest to be an evil. Nothing more, nothing less.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (93798)	4/16/2003 5:52:02 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I’ve seen no evidence to even remotely suggest that Iraq was a critical source of support for US-directed terrorism Wow.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (93798)	4/16/2003 6:07:05 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Benny Morris has a long Book Review/Article in the "New Republic on the Israel/Pal situation. Here is the heading, intro, and conclusion, with a URL. BLEAK CONCLUSIONS FROM THE HISTORY OF A PEOPLE. The Rejection by Benny Morris Post date: 04.11.03 Issue date: 04.21.03 The Palestinian People: A History By Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal What are the Palestinians after? There are two basic interpretations of their actions in the past three years, which began with their rejection of the Barak-Clinton compromise proposals and the launching of the ongoing terroristic and guerrilla assault on Israel known as the Aqsa Intifada. According to one view, the Palestinians are conducting a rebellion against a repressive military occupation and their aim is to establish a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which comprise 22 percent of historic Palestine. According to another view, they aim to destroy Israel and replace it with a Palestinian Arab (and perhaps Islamic) state in all of historic Palestine, "from the river to the sea." In this view, ejecting Israel from the territories is merely a stage on the road to Israel's liquidation, which, like the ultimately successful Islamic assault on the medieval Crusader kingdoms, may take several centuries. To judge from the declarations in English of their secular Fatah-dominated leadership, headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinians have strived since 1988 for a Palestinian state alongside Israel: the "two-state solution." To judge from the statements of some of these same Fatah leaders (including Arafat) in Arabic, and from the pronouncements by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they seek Israel's destruction and replacement by an Arab (or Islamic) state. Why the forked tongue of most of the Fatah leaders? Perhaps they really aspire to a two-state solution but feel that they must appease their people with rejectionist pronouncements, so as to assure their hold on the leadership and their room for maneuver in the continuous struggle against the rejectionists and the Islamicists in their midst. Perhaps, like the Islamicists, they really intend to destroy Israel but feel that they must dupe sympathetic Israelis and Western supporters of Israel who might be antagonized by a frank rejectionism.<<< >>>>>In December 2000, Clinton set out the guidelines for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. Those guidelines, whether or not Yasir Arafat or Ariel Sharon like them, remain the only basis for a reasonable peace that provides both peoples with a modicum of justice and security. But the Palestinians will first have to give up their dream of destroying Israel and discard their insistence on the "right of return." Their leaders will have to tell their people, in the camps outside Tyre and Beirut and Damascus and Gaza and Nablus and Amman, that there will be no return to the garden, that the price of that dream is too high. And Sharon, or his successor, will have to give up the dream of a Greater Israel. But I do not see these happy developments happening anytime soon. I fear that we are in for a long and bloody haul. Benny Morris is professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University and the author, most recently, of The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews (I.B. Tauris & Co).<<<<<<< tnr.com