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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/21/2003 12:10:31 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793755

I told you last year that I thought the Wall was a good idea, and I still think it is, in general. In particular one reads that there are difficulties in the configuration of the Wall, places that are insanely difficult to justify in terms of day-to-day life for Israelis OR Palestinians. I remain hopeful that many of those difficulties are intended to be bargaining chips. But sometimes a wall is just a wall. It reminds me of the ghettos or shtetels that Jews used to live behind in Europe - there were voluntary aspects, so that Orthodox Jews did not have to rub elbows with Gentiles (the meaning of Gentile is "unclean"), for one. Here in the US there are gated or walled communities, that rich people live inside so they don't have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi and the criminal elements. Makes sense to me.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/21/2003 6:05:23 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793755

Turns out that everybody else got the same Email you did. And they are reacting the same way you did. "Ranting Profs." POOR MAN Pity poor Mr. Okrent. Here he takes the job as first "Public Editor" at the New York Times, a job he knows will not be easy. Facing the first controversy of his tenure, he thinks (no doubt) he's appropriately split the baby in half with Solomonic precision, both admitting the Baghdad bureau "dropped the ball" while simultaneously defending them by noting they are working under difficult circumstances (true) and that the Iraqi demonstrators didn't adequately advertise their demonstration in advance (please.) A bridge too far, as we say. If he had just stopped with "life can be difficult and work terribly complicated" I think everyone would have chalked this one up to a nice first go out of the gate, been pleased he'd conceded to a mistake, understood he had to also defend his people, and even conceded back that life in a war zone in fact isn't easy. But by mentioning that lack of advance warning all he did was light off a second firestorm. Everyone in the blogosphere who was upset the first time around, it seems, is upset all over again. After all, people are pointing out, if we knew, why didn't they know? It's being taken as primae facie evidence that the Timesmen and women aren't reading the Iraqi bloggers, which is in turn being taken as in and of itself a sin, the Iraqis being represented as the most accessible representation of the authentic voice of the new Iraq. (Frankly I still the think the bigger problem with the argument is the simultaneous argument that "after all, we published a picture." If the problem is they didn't have enough warning to get their people in place, then how come the photographer was there?) Now alert reader Michael F. Fox points out another problem with this argument. How much advance warning is the Times getting from the pro-Saddam marchers, the al-Sadr supporters who march, the marchers who took to the streets after the moderate cleric was murdered in Najaf? Is it really the Times' argument that they can only get it together to cover events if they have enough advance warning? Obviously that isn't true when the news is bad. So we're right back to news judgement again, aren't we? rantingprofs.typepad.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/21/2003 7:06:03 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

Hmmm. I think this happened. And I think we will get a White House denial that it did. Bush declares: "We must get rid of Arafat" Sun Dec 21, 3:07 AM ET JERUSALEM, (AFP) - US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) told an Israeli journalist that "we must get rid of" Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites), the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot daily has reported. Bush's comments came in a brief exchange with the paper's correspondent during a Christmas drinks party in Washington, several hours after a keynote speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) Thursday in which he outlined plans for unilateral disengagement from peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The US government has boycotted Arafat with Bush accusing the veteran leader of failing the Palestinian people. Israel has also shunned the 74-year-old, branding him an absolute obstacle to peace and confining him to his West Bank headquarters for more than two years. Israel's security cabinet approved Arafat's "removal" in September, with one minister even suggesting that he could be assassinated, but Washington warned Israel not to attempt to expel him. Bush was non-commital about Sharon's speech, saying that he would wait to see what happened on the ground. "Speeches are good things, but they are words. I am waiting for action," he was quoted as saying. "Now is the time to do a lot in the Middle East, and I am determined and committed to doing that. You can be sure that I have done a lot until now, but I am going to keep on doing. I am going to continue to be active and committed to my vision." story.news.yahoo.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/21/2003 10:32:20 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793755

Paul Wolfowitz - The godfather of the Iraq war By Mark Thompson TIME Posted Sunday, December 21, 2003; 7:45 a.m. EST As tag teams go, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, could not be more unlikely. Rumsfeld is a Cook County, Ill., politician, while Wolfowitz would be more at home at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate. That makes them the most interesting one-two combination this side of Bush-Cheney. If Rumsfeld is the face, mouth and strong right arm of the war in Iraq, Wolfowitz—the intellectual godfather of the war—is its heart and soul. Whereas Rumsfeld talks about Iraq like a technician, Wolfowitz sounds more like a prophet. Says a close associate of the deputy's: "Paul asks himself every day how he can limit suffering by toppling another dictator or by helping people to govern themselves." Rumsfeld offered Wolfowitz his current post with an invitation to serve as his intellectual alter ego, a senior aide says. Their offices are a short walk apart along the Pentagon's E-Ring. Wolfowitz frequently slips down a back hallway, peers through a peephole into his boss's suite and, if Rumsfeld is alone, walks right in. "He's got great power of concentration," says Wolfowitz, "so you can open the door—it doesn't disturb him—until he pauses, and I ask, ÔCan you take a minute?'" They talk half a dozen times a day, on matters small and large. Rumsfeld likes to chaff his deputy. "If there's a grammatical error in something I've written," Wolfowitz says, "he loves to correct it and say, ÔAnd he has a Ph.D.!'" Most Pentagons feature a top guy who's a big thinker and a No. 2 who's the day-to-day manager. Rummy and Wolfie (as the President calls them) have it reversed: Wolfowitz is more ideological than Rumsfeld, which has suited both men for different reasons. Wolfowitz often ventured way ahead of the rest of the Administration on foreign policy matters over the past two years, and Rumsfeld frequently let him go. That allowed Wolfowitz to push the whole Bush team to the right, which also let Rumsfeld align himself with that crowd when it served his purpose to do so. "Rumsfeld's a big-enough maestro to understand that Wolfowitz was the leading edge and that someone had to do it," a Pentagon associate says. "Are there times when it made him uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are there times when he had to crank it back? Yes. But did it work for him? Clearly." Wolfowitz has spent much of his career as a fierce defender of democracy. In Ronald Reagan's State Department, he pushed autocrats in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea toward reform. In George H.W. Bush's Administration, he was the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian and the first to argue that letting Saddam Hussein remain in power was a mistake. In the current Administration, he was the first to push Bush to topple Saddam in the wake of 9/11—and he did so just four days after the tragedy. Over coffee at Camp David, Wolfowitz privately broached the idea with Bush, who pulled him aside during a break and urged him to bring it up at a later meeting. The onetime diplomat seems to lack the diplomatic gene. Wolfowitz was seen as clumsy and heavy-handed after the release on a U.S. government website of his memo barring nations that didn't participate in the invasion from winning U.S. contracts to rebuild Iraq—at the same time the U.S. was trying to persuade those nations to forgive Iraq's debt. Says a Pentagon official: "We ended up looking petty and petulant." The Rummy and Wolfie show may soon go off the air. It is widely believed in national-security circles that Wolfowitz may leave the Administration sometime in 2004. He has become too controversial for Bush to promote to Defense Secretary; Wolfowitz believed that U.S. troops in Iraq would be greeted with rose petals. He remains unbowed about the postwar effort. "I'd like to know, among those people who say we should have had better plans, just which plan they had in mind that would have prevented the murderers and torturers that raped and abused that country for 35 years from continuing to fight this destructive war until they're defeated. The bottom line is," he says, "these are tough, ugly bastards." time.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/21/2003 11:53:15 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

"As for me, I've spent three years arguing that a withdrawal in the face of terror is a bad idea, and nobody has yet convinced me exactly what has changed, that I should think differently now. The only mitigating factor is that I trust Sharon as a canny politician and no naif, who know exactly what he's dealing with on the other side." Perhaps the US expects something from each country in the mideast. Libya did what they have to. Bush seem somewhat happy with developments vis a vis nukes in Iran. Perhaps Syria will do something dramatic in a positive sense. In the NYT today, there is talk of reform under Mubareks son and so on. So how do Israel and the PA figure in this mix? How do you control uprooted settlers and angry, stateless palestinians? HOw does the Wall figure in to all of this. Who will the US enlist to seal the deal in the mideast? Perhaps it is Jordan! There is no need for a a Palestinian rump state on the West Bank regardless of borders but a West Bank populous with political rights as a region of Jordan?? I know that you have pooh poohed this idea before because of Jordan's earlier experience but perhaps the time has come to turn the Palestinians negative hostility toward Israel toward a positive role in Jordan's hopefully democratic and prosperous future. Perhaps a free trade zone of sorts between Jordan, West Bank and Israel. Perhaps Saudi involvement? I have always thought this to be the solution and I always have been wrong. Maybe this can be a third way. It certainly takes the pressure off minute border details and with the removal of the settlers on the wrong size of the wall, stabilizes Israel as a predominately Jewish state. You know far more about the nitty gritty details than i do Nadine, but i think from a macro perspective the time may be right for my long mothballed solution. I would like you to consider this is the light of what has happened in the mideast since the iraq war. Your thoughts!!! MIke

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (20712)	12/22/2003 6:02:52 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793755

Nadine, some thoughts about what Sharon's up to. Doing down Arafat, that's what. He's laying the groundwork for something, I just can't tell what at the moment. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are making noises as if the Palestinians are being threatened with something, but I cannot see what. Those Palestinians who are at war with Israel will be forced by this to become "formal" about it and must carry the whole population with them. Right now, they are getting support from the Palestinian population, or at least enough of it, to carry on a "low cost" war. If the wall goes up then it becomes a matter of direct attack with more conventional weapons and response by Israel with same. I doubt if they would get support from the Pals for direct engagement with the Israeli army across the length and breadth of Palestine. The non fanatics would just stay home and let the Israelis wipe out the others. If Israel is attacked by Pals in a conventional way, then they will be defeated and the model would look much like Iraq and the US or perhaps Germany post WW2. That's a possible scenario. The Europeans and Arabs might whinge about it but what's done is done. A unilateral withdrawal to lines of Israel's choosing, with not even a worthless promise made in exchange? Why should Arafat object to that? See above. He'll be forced from mere terrorism to conventional warfare. Something I suspect he has no competence at doing. If Arafat doesn't attack Israel after the wall goes up what will his platform be? He only has one tool and policy and won't be able to implement or use them effectively. Take a look at Palestinian polls - you can see his problems growing if the wall goes up. So the Palestinians will have to switch to missiles, why should they care? If their Euro backers have never called them on blowing up pizzerias, what's a few missiles? What's a few missiles? The wall makes for a longer standoff. Home made stuff isn't going to suffice. They get the more advanced weapons from the Syrians or whoever, they can attack from further away but so can the Israelis and far more effectively. Artillery tracking radar means they get only one attack away and the response is instant utter destruction of the launch site and serious collateral damage.