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

To: LindyBill who wrote (98867)	5/23/2003 12:02:59 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Meantime, a few news items from the 'roadmapped' Mideast: Hizbullah terror ship seized By MARGOT DUDKEVITCH Israeli naval commandos seized a fishing boat from Lebanon loaded with rocket fuses, electronic bombmaking components and Hizbullah compact discs containing instructions on how to put together explosives belts used by suicide bombers, military officials said Thursday. ...The most significant suspect was identified as Hamed Amsalem Abu Amra, a Hizbullah man suspected of planning to help instruct Palestinian terrorists about bombmaking techniques. ...the IDF suspects that two Palestinian officials, Adel Almairibi and Fathi Razam, a naval commander and aide to Yasser Arafat, weren't on ship but gave the orders to carry out the operation to bring the material to the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Hizbullah instructor. jpost.com Ah, you say, but PA "Prime Minister" Abbas is trying to get Hamas to stop terrorism? Hamas rebuffs Abbas, vows to continue terrorism By KHALED ABU TOAMEH Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip have rejected a request by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to suspend terrorist attacks on Israel. jpost.com Abbas can't get the time of day from Hamas, and is in no position to try to move against them. If the whole PA were behind him, he might be able to try, but of course Arafat is in open alliance with Hamas and Hizbullah. Hamas has been doing very nicely, of course, as there have been five successful attacks in the last two weeks. Is Israel going answer with any sort of action that would put Hamas on the defensive? No, not when Bush is pushing the Israelis to do another round of dances-with-terrorists: Israel's hands are now tied not by Iraq, but by not wanting to do anything that would damage Abbas's chances to take action, or anything that would be perceived at least in Washington as being the reason why the road map cannot be implemented. According to one senior diplomatic official, we are now in a "very complex and delicate situation that could easily deteriorate into chaos. Everything could blow up, and we don't want to blamed for scuttling the process." http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1053571486321

To: LindyBill who wrote (98867)	5/23/2003 9:44:02 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, it does give these small countries a place to come and blather. Interesting comment, in light of the following clip from a recent NYT article... Lawmakers have been stewing for weeks over the administration's failure to consult in depth with Congress about the costs, methods and goals of rebuilding Iraq, and some of those frustrations boiled over at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The UN is just a place for little countries to come and blather; Congress is just a place for little people and their irrelevant elected representatives to come and blather. Meanwhile, the real decisions will be made by the ones who have decided that they know best. The way we lead the world and the way our leaders lead us will come to resemble each other. Either leadership derives from the consent of those led, or it does not. Our leaders start to look as though they feel that their conviction in their own rectitude is more important than anybody's consent. If we let them apply this notion to the rest of the world, they'll be applying it to us soon enough.