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To: FaultLine who wrote (15360)	11/6/2003 3:05:10 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793759

FL, you may have missed this from Patti Davis last night... Message 19466170 Also, I wouldn't just blame the "Republicans" for the CBS decision (or was it 'lack of money talks?')....Aren't the parties pretty evenly split? Or are you saying there are more Repubs tham Dems? No, I think that the "great unwashed masses" of Americans saw this as a smear job against a President they liked....and decided that "They'd had enough and weren't going to take it any more." hummmmmmmmmmmm...sounds like 'Network" to me.

To: FaultLine who wrote (15360)	11/6/2003 4:23:32 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793759

or the Right made damn sure it "looked like" they did. They got caught, and now all they can say is, "mumble, mumble, grumble, grumble." :>)

To: FaultLine who wrote (15360)	11/6/2003 11:48:03 AM
From: GST	Respond to of 793759

Present-day Iraq is no postwar Germany, historians say WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US government has drawn parallels between post-Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) Iraq (news - web sites) and Germany after World War II, a view historians see as just too audacious from economic, social and political standpoints. At the end of September, faced with increasing public pressure against the US mission in Iraq, President George W. Bush (news - web sites) said America had "done this kind of work before. "Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany and stood with them as they built representative governments," Bush said in his September 27 address to the nation. A number of historians beg to differ. "The historical settings and the international and local and cultural peculiarities are so different in our two cases ... that even the most imaginative and daring historians would think twice about taking on such a comparative project," believes Christof Mauch of the German Historical Institute in Washington. "Circumstances in the current situation are so different," Mauch told an audience at a symposium Monday in the US federal capital, held jointly by the institute and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. The US administration appears to proffer such comparisons between Iraq and Germany in order to justify the United States' huge economic and military engagement in Iraq. As Bush explained in his White House and Quantico speeches of September 14: "We contributed years and resources to this cause" of rebuilding Japan and Germany and in the wake of World War II "that effort has been repaid many times over three generations of friendship and peace." "US occupiers found an economic infrastructure remarkably intact" in the Germany of the late 1940s, according to historian Rebecca Boehling. "German society as a whole was ethnically homogeneous and of the majority professing a religion almost exclusively Christian." The situation today in Iraq is not the same, according to James Tent of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "The Iraqi people of 2003 are in an entirely different situation," said Tent. "They really have no experience with democracy." Especially erroneous in historians' eyes is the comparison between Iraqis leading attacks against US forces and the "Werwoelfe" a secret group founded by the Nazis, as drawn by Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites). Rice said in a speech to veterans August 24 that between 1945 and 1947 "SS officers, called Werewolves, engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating witht them, much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants." And resistance to US occupation of Germany was quite weak, says Timothy Naftali of the University of Virginia. "Besides the single assassination of a single mayor in the western town of Aachen, and a few scattered incidents of unruly Hitlerjugend, there was no German resistance to speak of," Naftali said. The Americans entered a beaten Germany with "overwhelming force" represented by some three million soldiers that was a major influence in deterring potential rebellions. That strategy is in in stark contrast to the one used by the United States in Iraq. Today, Washington is looking to use a dramatically smaller force. And therein lies an important lesson for the situation in Iraq, according to many experts. By keeping a considerable force in Germany after the war, the United States was able to avoid any serious opposition emerging. Naftali underlined another important reason for the evaporation of Nazi resistance: Adolf Hitler's suicide, which left Nazis leaderless. Had Saddam Hussein been found dead, the historic parallel would have been clearer, according to the historian. "With him dead, you might see more similarities between the end of World War II in Germany and what's going on in Iraq," he added. story.news.yahoo.com