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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (125174)	2/27/2004 1:02:48 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<People like GST simply have no answer to those questions. They believe Arabs are incapable of being self-sustaining and peaceful societies.. Everything we're doing is in vain because all Arabs want to do, if I understand him correctly, is wage Jihad. But I'm not buying that racist perspective. I, and many others, understand that the muslims are engaged in a religious and cultural civil war. A war which the progressives will eventually win, but only at the cost of millions of lives and decades of fundamentalist rule, fueled by oil wealth (which they know will subsidize their regimes)..> What I understand is that you are waging an ideologically driven propaganda war in support of an ideologically driven shooting war in which innocent people, Americans and Iraqis, are the victims. In the war you wage truth is the first casualty. You try repeatedly to justify this by appealing to your own apocalyptic clash-of-civilization visions in which millions must die violent deaths to deliver us to your promised land. Radical extremists are from time-to-time mistaken for sane human beings and allowed to make their way into key decision-making roles -- this past year has been one of those times. Sanity tries to return after the senseless shedding of blood -- if we are lucky it will return soon. It will not return soon enough to prevent the injury and death of many more Americans who joined the reserves to get an education and found themselves on the front lines of a needless, pointless and bloody war. This too will pass for those who survive and return home. My deepest sympathies to those who don't and to their families. This is just politics to you. It makes the loss of life all the more tragic.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (125174)	2/27/2004 10:51:50 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

People like GST simply have no answer to those questions. They believe Arabs are incapable of being self-sustaining and peaceful societies.. Everything we're doing is in vain because all Arabs want to do, if I understand him correctly, is wage Jihad. But I'm not buying that racist perspective. I, and many others, understand that the muslims are engaged in a religious and cultural civil war.... GST and people of his ilk, are too busy playing partisan politics and engaging in "bush bashing", rather than trying to understand the demographic and economic mega-trends which have driven the events of the past couple of years. I'm pretty sure that I am someone of GST's "ilk" in your eyes. But from my/our[?] perspective, it was GWB who is "busy playing partisan politics," and who doesn't "understand the demographic and economic megatrends" of the mideast. They threw a stick of dynamite into a tinder box of already smoldering embers and have risked turning it into a maelstrom--unnecessarily. Certainly unnecessarily at the time. Their ignorance of the area has been demonstrated many times, but perhaps the most amazing example of it was when they tried over the summer to get the Turks to send soldiers into Iraq--without understanding for even a moment how that would be received by their own allies within Iraq. And they were rebuffed by those allies in no uncertain terms. I know, I know, you and Nadine and other supporters will say, yes it was necessary to do it then--but this is just an astonishing claim to me. There were and still are far more important things to accomplish than taking out a Saddam who was already defanged and, based on reports, rather out of touch with reality as it was. For one, pursuing Osama and friends in Afghanistan, and stabilizing that "unlucky" country, as Karzai was quoted in a recent article as saying. Not that that would have been easy, but it was and is far more necessary than dealing with Iraq the way we have dealt with it. If Bush would have done that, he would be in a far better position today than he is. And so would the US. You and the Bush admin have far too much faith in military power to resolve political problems, IMO. But salting the earth isn't (fortunately) our style. Not yet and hopefully never will be. And when that isn't an option, military power has distinct limits in a very foreign culture.