Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106208)	7/18/2003 3:34:11 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

LOL! Pretty funny Nadine, and quite true!

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106208)	7/18/2003 3:52:23 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

SULLIVAN Friday, July 18, 2003 THE TURNING TIDE: Tony Blair's speech yesterday was a masterpiece of concision, precision and passion. One day, someone should write a good book on how two British prime ministers, Thatcher and Blair, have come to have such high and powerful profiles in the U.S. My favorite extract from Blair's speech was the following Ciceronian paragraph: Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.This is what the carpers and nay-sayers still don't understand. The West is at war with a real and uniquely dangerous enemy. When the consequences of negligence become catastrophic, the equation of intervention changes. The burden of proof must be on those who counsel inaction rather than on those who urge an offensive, proactive battle. Does it matter one iota, for example, if we find merely an apparatus and extensive program for building WMDs in Iraq rather than actual weapons? Or rather: given the uncertain nature of even the best intelligence, should we castigate our leaders for over-reacting to a threat or minimizing it? Since 9/11, my answer is pretty categorical. Blair and Bush passed the test. They still do. BLAIR'S LIBERALISM: But what Tony Blair's speech does more than anything else is reveal the decadent state of American liberalism. Imagine if a Democratic candidate could speak as clearly and as forcefully about the war on terror - and then criticized the Bush administration on domestic matters or progress on homeland security. When was the last time you heard a 'liberal' actually speak of liberty in so enthusiastic and unambiguous a manner? Here's Blair in full throttle: The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify around an idea. And that idea is liberty. (Applause.) We must find the strength to fight for this idea and the compassion to make it universal. Abraham Lincoln said, "Those that deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." And it is this sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty. Blair has helpfully reminded us once again of the urgent need to deal with the threat of Islamo-fascism, to rebuild those societies plagued by it however long it takes, to pursue every possible avenue to bring a settlement between Israel and Palestinian Arabs - to place the toughness of war in the context of a rebirth of liberty. He also reminds us of the need to bring as much of Europe along as we possibly can. BUT HE ALSO GETS AMERICA: Beyond this, Blair seems to get America. He has an amazing instinct for public mood, for what others need to hear, and yesterday, he delivered. I found his peroration intensely moving - for its clarity and for its empathy: We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind -- black or white; Christian or not; left, right or merely indifferent -- to be free -- free to raise a family in love and hope; free to earn a living and be rewarded by your own efforts; free not to bend your knee to any man in fear; free to be you, so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others. That's what we're fighting for, and it's a battle worth fighting. And I know it's hard on America. And in some small corner of this vast country, out in Nevada or Idaho or these places I've never been to but always wanted to go -- (laughter) -- I know out there, there's a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, "Why me, and why us, and why America?" And the only answer is because destiny put you in this place in history in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do. And our job -- my nation, that watched you grow, that you fought alongside and now fights alongside you, that takes enormous pride in our alliance and great affection in our common bond -- our job is to be there with you. You're not going to be alone. We will be with you in this fight for liberty. We will be with you in this fight for liberty. And if our spirit is right and our courage firm, the world will be with us.It doesn't get much better than that, does it? The president is bloody lucky to have this prime minister. We all are.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106208)	7/18/2003 5:37:29 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

July 17, 2003 Radical Cheek Who's rad? By Michael Young - Reason One of the splendid media sagas in the last two years has been the movement of journalist Christopher Hitchens from political left to right on Afghanistan and Iraq. What prompted this were the September 11 attacks against New York and Washington, and Hitchens' subsequent assessment that the greatest threat to democratic humanism came from what he termed "Islamic fascism." Swinging from left to right is a venerable tradition, with countless former radicals having put down in the bosom of conservative conformity. This was the case, for example, of Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who graduated from being editors of the radical Ramparts magazine in the 1960s to manufacturing biographies of prosperous American grandees. Another pilgrim on the rightward trail was Norman Podhoretz, who, armed only with bituminous prose, stands father and father-in-law to two of America's most prominent neo-conservatives. Hitchens is in a second category, stimulated less by the pull of right-wing conformism than by resentment against the left's willful ignorance. Last year he ended a two-decade-old relationship with the left-wing The Nation magazine because, as he saw it, the magazine was "becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that (US Attorney General) John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." Hitchens' point was that the parochial hatreds of the American left had thrown its sense of priorities dangerously out of whack. This echoed what Hitchens' hero, George Orwell, wrote in two of his novels, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier . For both writers ideology is an obstacle to a commonsensical assessment of right and wrong: Orwell couldn't stomach that the left, through its fealty to the Soviet Union, overlooked the worst torments wrought by Stalinism. Hitchens couldn't accept that the Bush administration's critics were too busy attacking the president on Afghanistan and Iraq to realize they had become objective allies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Hitchens' sentence has been excommunication from the dismal radical paradise. Some of his detractors hint it was money that made him prostitute himself to the political right. Others say that his poison was power, and that with Washington leaning heavily to the right, Hitchens had to convert. Still others saw his metamorphoses as the outcome of a political mugging by the left after the Sidney Blumenthal affair, when Hitchens revealed that the former Clinton aide, a friend, had lied to protect the president. Only rarely has it been said that Hitchens' denunciations are sincere. And almost never has it been suggested by those on the left that he, more than they, embodies what it means to be a radical?one who sees criticism as something necessarily following the observation of abhorrent actions, not the computation of political costs and benefits as they pertain to one's allies or enemies. Such calculations, however, have permeated the thinking of the anti-Iraq war coalition in the West, more specifically its left-wing constituent that has posited equivalence between the American conflict with Saddam Hussein and its own battle with the Bush administration. There has been a steady stream of articles and commentaries along these lines in recent months, scarcely interrupted by the discovery of mass graves in Iraq. To examine at close range the tortured arguments of a bankrupt radicalism, turn to an article by Ammiel Alcalay in last week's issue of the always enlightening Al-Ahram Weekly, titled "Politics and Imagination: After the Fall of Baghdad." Alcalay, who teaches in New York, begins his comment by lamenting the decline of radical internationalism, dating its last gasp to the late 1960s. If the militant urge has been moribund for that long, it could be time for Alcalay to ask why. However, it is when mentioning Iraq that Alcalay shows the real difficulties in the left's critique of the war against Saddam. He writes: "Iraq has been subjected to severe humiliation, vanquished by the former ally of their most bitter oppressor, asked to feel liberated by those who starved and suffocated them through a decade of the most draconian sanctions ever devised." All the ingredients of the left's antiwar discourse are found in that clumsy phrase: the invalid heaping together of George W. Bush's administration with previous administrations that did indeed cultivate ties with Saddam; the flimsy allegation that it was the US that starved and suffocated the Iraq people, when it was the Baath regime that did so by abusing an oil-for-food system administered by the UN; the fake identification with Iraqi humiliation, as if three decades of maltreatment by the Tikritis was anything but humiliating; and the hypocritical insult against Saddam, inserted to disguise the fact that the passage is really directed at the US. It is to Hitchens' credit that he broke with the left before engaging in the verbal gymnastics of his former comrades. His story, however, is a microcosm of a greater problem faced by Western radical intellectuals: An inability to define what radicalism truly means today and to confuse it all too often with anti-Americanism. Michael Young a Reason contributing editor, writes from Lebanon. This story originally appeared in the Beirut Daily Star. His weblog can be read at www.beirutcalling.blogspot.com. reason.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106208)	7/18/2003 5:39:14 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Clinton did take plenty of heat on that from the self-righteous right-wing hotheads around SI, at least when they could be distracted from the other voluminous crap they were perpetually pumping out. Plus, current token "liberal" war cheerleader Christopher Hitchens almost made a new career out of bashing the Sudan operation. However dubious that intelligence may have been, the Sudan / bin Laden connection still seems a lot clearer than all the garbage W's local loyal suckups keep regurgitating about any alleged Iraq / bin Laden connection. Anyway, would you like to do a bodycount comparison ?