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

To: NickSE who wrote (100511)	6/6/2003 11:30:27 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, I think you've missed the point of the 'boot' theme there. So, I'll try setting my humour mode into bypass to match you: but I can't answer in kind because I've never seen anyone here who said or implied that the US was the sole source of the world's ills. On the first two, that would be the prophetic realist wing. And, now that you mention it, the genuine parallels with late Weimar are becoming daily more striking... but that's <ot> here. At least until the whole ME is under US occupation, at which point we'll need somewhere else F for the FADG.

To: NickSE who wrote (100511)	6/6/2003 12:39:38 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

French Troops Arrive in Congo War Zone By REUTERS NEW YORK TIMES About time the French got off their butt. BUNIA, Congo (Reuters) - An advance party of French troops arrived to cheers from residents in Congo's Bunia town on Friday in the first deployment of a 1,400-strong rapid reaction force to stop bloodletting among rival militias. The United Nations says 500 civilians have been massacred in inter-ethnic fighting in and around the northeastern town in the past month and 50,000 have been killed since 1999. Residents were relieved. ``It's what we have been waiting for,'' said teacher Dieudonne Macheka. ``People are waiting for the forces to arrive so they can leave their hiding places.'' A 700-strong U.N. mission is in the region, but its mandate is limited and militias linked to the Hema and Lendu tribes have killed hundreds despite their presence. Militiamen from both sides, often drugged or drunk, have also raped and looted and forced thousands of civilians from Bunia, a dilapidated settlement of more than 200,000 people near the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) border with Uganda. Hundreds of residents outside a U.N. base in the middle of Bunia cheered and clapped as a van of French troops drove in from the airport, shouting ``Take courage!'' and ``Free us!.'' ``I want to know if they will do patrols. We need them to do that, because there are too many armed robberies, too many outlaws,'' resident Gestin Chandi said. ``The new force should be different from MONUCbecause it has a mandate that should allow it to intervene if there is violence,'' Macheka said. ``They can act with force if faced with resistance. That's why we have more confidence in them.'' Two planeloads of French soldiers with Jeep-type reconnaissance vehicles and light weapons flew in shortly after dawn. Soldiers said the arrivals numbered 100. ``Our main mission in the coming days is to secure the airport in liaison with MONUC on the ground and to get our deployment ready,'' said the senior officer of the French soldiers, who declined to give his name. About five British troops also arrived on Friday on a reconnaissance mission to prepare for a possible larger UK involvement, a U.N. spokesman said. Though Bunia is largely quiet, unconfirmed reports suggest rebels are still carrying out executions in the town. MILITIA DEMANDS The 1,400-strong force has been approved by the U.N. Security Council and will include some 1,000 French troops, backed by fighter jets based in the region. The rest of the force will come from other European Union nations and countries such as Canada and South Africa. Its mission will end on September 1. The main militia in Bunia, the Rwandan-backed Hema Union of Patriotic Congolese (UPC), is expected to hand over control of the town once the force completes its deployment. But U.N. officials say the UPC wants to keep in place its 700 fighters in the town in order to protect Hema leaders. It is unclear whether this will be acceptable to the French-led force. The wider war in the DRC, now gradually subsiding, began in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern Congo to help rebel groups fight the Kinshasa government, which was propped up by troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia. The conflict has led to the deaths of an estimated three million people, mostly through disease and starvation. nytimes.com

To: NickSE who wrote (100511)	6/6/2003 7:52:53 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

'Root causes' of terrorism oliverkamm.blogspot.com The economists Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova review the empirical evidence for the "poverty is the root cause of terrorism" thesis (a cliche that for some reason is particularly popular among liberal Protestant clergy) and find it weak (link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily): "Apart from population - larger countries tend to have more terrorists - the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists. Poverty and literacy were unrelated to the number of terrorists from a country…. "Instead of viewing terrorism as a response - either direct or indirect - to poverty or ignorance, we suggest that it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes." Krueger and Maleckova published a longer account of their findings last year in The New Republic, after encountering an unexpected obstacle to presenting their original academic paper at the planned venue. According to the Harvard economist Robert Barro: "The paper was scheduled for presentation at the World Bank’s annual conference in Washington in April but was pulled from presentation in response to complaints initiated by a Kuwaiti executive director and later joined by other executive directors. A source at the Bank confirmed that the paper was withdrawn in response to this pressure, as well as fears that a controversial study of terrorist identities would serve to inflame an already highly sensitive political situation in the Middle East. The irony is that the annual conference was created to be a forum in which outside researchers could participate without fear of censorship. Solving problems, such as those in the Middle East, depends on having the reliable information that can come only from this sort of free scientific inquiry." Of course Barro is right about the primacy of scientific inquiry, but you can see the misplaced logic behind the frightened reaction he describes. If terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by those who grow up under repressive regimes, then you can plausibly infer that there is indeed a sort of "root cause" at work: the existence of the repressive regimes. The obvious case is Saudi Arabia, where the absence of outlets for political dissent has caused disaffection to migrate to the religious – or rather theocratic, Islamist – sphere. And rather than counter the spread of nihilist totalitarian ideology, the Saudi regime tries instead to channel it, with its own Wahhabist version, away from itself and towards instead the West, Israel, and the Jews. There are, in short, empirical grounds as well as moral ones for believing the Bush administration has read the issue of terrorism much better than those who complain that force is no substitute for attending to "root causes" – which oddly always seem to be identical with whatever fashionable concerns these critics were protesting about in the first place. There is no economic or ameliorative solution to the problem of international terrorism. The only course open to us is to take the fight directly to those groups that have declared holy war on western civilisation, and then to undermine the autocracies that incubate them.