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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15846)	11/11/2003 3:14:42 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793681

When a UN Agency is this ticked, they must really be thumbing their nose at them. ________________________________ Iran Failed to Disclose Its Atomic Steps, Agency Says By Douglas Frantz Times Staff Writer November 11, 2003 ISTANBUL, Turkey — A harshly worded new report by the U.N. atomic watchdog agency says that Iran was concealing some of its nuclear activities as recently as last month but that inspectors have found no proof of an active weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency document says inspectors recently discovered that Iran had engaged in experiments to reprocess plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. Iran last month admitted the experiments on reprocessing, which could be a step toward weapons development. The document also says that Iran now acknowledges operating a secret uranium enrichment program using lasers for 12 years and using uranium chemicals imported from China in experiments to enrich uranium at a previously secret location. Enrichment is a process that purifies uranium for use in reactors or weapons. Earlier, when the IAEA had noted that the Chinese chemicals were missing and asked Iran about them, Tehran claimed they had leaked out of storage canisters. A copy of the 30-page report was provided to the Los Angeles Times on Monday by a Western diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA is headquartered. In its toughest language, the report said: "Based on all information currently available to the agency, it is clear that Iran has failed in a number of instances over an extended period of time to meet its obligations under its safeguard agreement with respect to the reporting of nuclear material and its processing and use." Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, said in the report that inspectors had turned up no evidence that the concealed activities were linked to a nuclear weapons program. "However, given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purpose," he said. The report, which notes that the IAEA investigation is continuing, detailed nine separate instances in which it said Iran had failed to report nuclear activities as required under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or failed to provide required information to the agency. REST AT latimes.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15846)	11/11/2003 3:22:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793681

Good comment from James Taranto on Freidman's "Humiliation" column. ...There's only so much the West can do to overcome the Palestinians' sense of humiliation, which is largely of their own and their fellow Arabs' making. What we can do, though, is to treat the Palestinians like adults. That means respecting them enough to hold them responsible for their actions, rather than making excuses for unspeakable acts of barbarity. Every time an American or a European responds to a suicide bomber's massacre with sympathy for the perpetrator rather than outrage at the crime, it contributes to the Palestinians' humiliation. Pity, after all, is a form of contempt........ opinionjournal.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15846)	11/11/2003 9:53:16 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793681

Final Offer Why Iraq's last-minute peace overture was a sham. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 10, 2003, at 12:15 PM PT I.F. Stone used to say that the New York Times and the Washington Post were great newspapers because you never knew on what page you would find the front-page story. I find this rule to be highly variant in the case of the New York Times, which frequently puts great stuff on its front page but which often prints it upside down. This was especially so with last Thursday's headline: "Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avoid War." The subhead was "Wary CIA Rebuffed Back-Channel Proposal." If the Times wanted to give the impression that an 11th-hour chance for peace had been missed or rejected (an impression greatly reinforced by the selection of letters it has since chosen to print on the subject), then the headline was the overture to that interpretation. But James Risen's well-written and absorbing article actually sustains and fortifies the precisely opposite analysis. If his reportage is basically correct—and there is no reason to doubt it in essentials—then we must believe that some senior members of the Iraqi secret police, operating through a Lebanese businessman as intermediary, made urgent approaches to senior American policy hawks in February and March of this year. To avert an invasion, they were prepared to offer (and to offer in their dreaded leader's name) the following concessions: 1) proof that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, this proof to be confirmed by American military and civilian experts invited to see for themselves on the ground 2) the handing over of Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the United States for his part in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and since that date a protected refugee in Iraq 3) support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement as sponsored by Washington 4) the granting to the United States of "first priority" with respect to the exploitation of Iraqi oil and mineral rights 5) elections in Iraq as soon as two years hence. What a bargain! But those who complain that it was turned down by a war-hungry Bush administration have (yet again) shown themselves to have a mainly if not exclusively nincompoopish mentality. Observe the following obvious points: 1) The Iraqi approaches were specifically directed toward the world of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all of them highly identified with the "regime change" policy. These approaches were also undertaken at a time when American and British forces had already commenced a serious deployment in Kuwait, Qatar, and elsewhere. This is clearly a tribute to the only force that was acting as a trigger or catalyst for change: the group that had decided that further coexistence with Saddam Hussein was at once ignoble and impossible. It wasn't a case of contacting the Carter Center in Atlanta and trying to buy some spurious time. GO TO PART TWO

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15846)	11/11/2003 10:39:14 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793681

The problem with turning this list of intellectual achievements into a convincing "Islamic" golden age is that whatever flourished, did so not by reason of Islam but in spite of Islam. Moslems overran societies (Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, Syrian, Jewish) that possessed intellectual sophistication in their own right and failed to completely destroy their cultures. To give it the credit for what the remnants of these cultures achieved is like crediting the Red Army for the survival of Beethoven in East Berlin under Walter Ulbricht! Islam per se never encouraged science, in the sense of disinterested enquiry, because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge. THE MYTH OF AN ISLAMIC GOLDEN AGE by Srdja Trifkovic CHRONICLES MAGAZINE The disdain of Western Civilization, and the corresponding urge to glorify anything outside it, especially if it can be depicted as a victim of the West, is a well-known phenomenon of the contemporary academia. One of the forms it has taken in recent years is the attempt to artificially inflate the historic achievements of other civilizations beyond what the facts support. The noble savage myth is a commonplace; what is more complex is the myth that has been bandied about the supposed "golden age" of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. The myth of an Islamic Golden Age is needed by Islam’s apologists to save it from being damned by its present squalid condition; to prove, as it were, that there is more to Islam than the terrorism of Bin Laden and the decadence of the oil sheiks. It is, frankly, a confession that if the world judges it by what it is today, it comes up rather short, being a religion that has yet to produce a democratic or prosperous society, or social and cultural forms admired by neutral foreign observers the way anyone can admire American freedom, Japanese order, Israeli courage, or Italian style. Some liberal academics openly admit that they twist the Moslem past to serve their present-day intellectual agendas. For example, some who propound the myth of an Islamic golden age of tolerance admit that their goal is, "to recover for postmodernity that lost medieval Judeo-Islamic trading, social and cultural world, its high point pre-1492 Moorish Spain, which permitted and relished a plurality, a convivencia, of religions and cultures, Christian, Jewish and Moslem; which prized an historic internationality of space along with the valuing of particular cities; which was inclusive and cosmopolitan, cosmopolitan here meaning an ease with different cultures: still so rare and threatened a value in the new millennium as in centuries past." In other words, a fairy tale designed to create the illusion that multiculturalism has valid historical precedents that prove it can work. REST AT chroniclesmagazine.org