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

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (116194)	10/5/2003 3:58:57 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

What was My Lai? A horrible murderous abuse of people. It was also a sharp, seldom seen, deviation from our normal method of conducting war. A deviation that was immediately found objectionable at every command level. A deviation that was not tolerated. I would bet 99+% of American war veterans were disgusted by My Lai. Nothing about My Lai compares to what Hamas is doing. Hamas is conducting a deliberate campaign of terror, conceived and planned at the highest levels of the organization. The Hamas killing of Israeli women and children is not just condoned by the leaders, it is celebrated by them. No Hamas field commander has been court-martialed as William Calley was in 1968, for My Lai.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (116194)	10/7/2003 8:51:31 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Turning that logic around, if the Palestinians want the Israeli army to leave them alone, they should stop supporting terrorists and immediately turn in any they discover because doing otherwise will mean they face a violent backlash. That is a rational formulation, but also a most unlikely one. For one thing, it’s a bit like telling them that the only way they can be left alone is to surrender. A lot of Palestinians believe, rightly, wrongly, and for whatever reason, that they are at war and that terrorism and intifadeh are the only weapons they have. I’m also not sure that all the Palestinians want the Israelis to leave them alone. I suspect that there are people in the Palestinian leadership who believe that the Israelis can be provoked into retaliatory measures extreme enough to endanger American support, and that this is one of Israel’s most vulnerable points. the only way to avoid this mess would have been for the Jews to leave that area 5,000 or 6,000 years ago to prevent the historical connection they have to it or for the Muslims to exclude it from theire 8th century religious imperialism. Neither happened. Now we have the current mess. The fight was not between any of these monumentally outdated and irrelevant historical claims. It was a fight between people who lived on some land and people who wanted to control that land. Not unlike the fight between the Israelites and the Philistines. This sort of thing happens all the time. It does not normally result in a 50+ year feud with tanks, planes, missiles, and cannons. This sort of thing does happen all the time, and it very frequently results in extended periods of violent conflict. I can’t begin to count the number of long-running conflicts in the world that spring from combinations of tribal/sectarian conflict, disputed borders, emotional spillover from prior conflicts, and migration. Beside the Congo and surrounding countries, where 5 million have been killed in the last decade, the Middle East is a warm and fuzzy testament to brotherly love, but you won’t see Congo stories on the evening news. The Congo doesn’t have strategically important oil reserves and all the dead people are black, so we pay no attention. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict takes center stage because we need the oil and because of the special position the Jewish faith has in the prevailing mythology of the West, not because it is unique, or even particularly severe. So all those oil-rich Arab states are poor? They have put no money and arms into this? We were talking about the first half of the century, when the oil that had been discovered in the region was firmly in the hands of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Arab states had nothing. Most of the ones we know didn’t even exist. Caucasian entrepeneurs in Silicon Valley usually don't tap their families for capital. Asians commonly do. Are the Asians cheating? Not at all, but what do you think would happen if they were buying up land in Silicon Valley with currencies of enormous value (imagine spending dollars or euros in Bangladesh or Vietnam) and flooding it with immigrants, with the avowed intention of establishing a sovereign state “as Asian as England is English”. How do you think the existing inmates would react to that? They would howl for controls on immigration, which is exactly what the Palestinians did first. If they didn’t get the controls, they would take other measures, not necessarily nice ones. To get any perspective on the conflict you have to look at the fundamental problem: the establishment of a Jewish State in a region with an existing and prevalently non-Jewish population was not a goal that could be achieved without violence.