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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Levine who wrote (70703)	10/16/2003 10:41:52 AM
From: runes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

<<It was the Arab countries who violated the imposed boundries, therefore going back to the conquest model.>> ...Oh, yes - the classic "They started it!" argument - a child's argument to be sure and one that is used to "justify" escalations like the words that become a shoving match that ends up a fistfight. You still don't seem to want to acknowledge that the conflict is the result of a long chain of events which has progressively escalated from distrust and bad attitudes to the current environment of random acts of violence. ...And that both parties were participants in and are responsible the current state of affairs. ...And that they can sit and point fingers at each other from now until the end of eternity and accomplish exactly nothing. ...They live in a hell of their own making and that will not change until both sides learn to acknowledge and accept that fact. Terrorism in the conflict - ...Terrorism is the systematic use of terror for the purpose of coercion. In that regard I would argue that the riots and attacks on settlers in the pre-Israel period were spontaneous rather than an orchestrated campaign unlike Ergun and the other Jewish group(s). ...But that is a minor distinction - at best. Violence is violence, murder is murder, death is death. The only reason that

To: Fred Levine who wrote (70703)	10/16/2003 11:54:36 AM
From: runes	Respond to of 70976

<<You have also mistated my position vis a vis Saddam.>> ...I'm not sure where this is coming from. Are you saying that you didn't support attacking Iraq despite the lack of UN support? <<What has been proven is that Saddam himself was a weapon of mass destruction.>> ...In a figurative sense - but that wasn't proven by recent events - that had been well established many years ago. <<...the essence of paranoia is the belief that someone is out to get us.>> ...No - it is the IRRATIONAL belief. Believing that Al Qaida is out to get us is not paranoia, it is a fact - one that was known long before 9-11 (and one that Bush failed to address until after 9-11). ...However the fear that Saddam was out to get us does wander into the realm of the irrational. We already had a stranglehold on his purse-strings and inspectors searching the nooks and crannies and we have the biggest army and we are already on heightened alert. And yet, according to the latest administration rationalization - we had to get him before he got us. ...That sounds like paranoia to me! For the record - I don't believe that the administration attacked Iraq out of paranoia - it was done for political/idealogical reasons. However they did exploit fear and paranoia of the citizenry.