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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yaacov who wrote (8322)	5/13/2005 5:32:04 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22250

Re: With mounting US casualty in Iraq, Bush adminsteration can not take any action, other than slap their wrist at the UN. The country has too strong a ties with China, Japan, and Euroepan Countries, and the world public opinion will not accept. US casualties in Iraq are mounting, to be sure, but then, compared to the 50,000 dead the US incurred in Vietnam... nothing to write home about, huh? Granted, times have changed and US opinion will not countenance another bloodshed the scale of 'Nam. Perhaps I should remind you of the main reason why Zionists are fretting over the Iranian Bomb? The nuclear bomb will actually give the Iranian regime the leverage to check Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinian people and its unilateral grab of ALL OF Jerusalem --in violation of scores of UN resolutions.... I guess the choice Israelis face is rather simple: either Israel goes Algeria's way or... South Africa's. Remember, during the French-Algerian war of 1954-62, even Frenchmen supportive of Algerian independence still envisioned an independent Algeria inhabited by Pieds Noirs. Provided that the latter abided by the one-man-one-vote rule and, insofar as Algerian authorities guaranteed their property rights, why would the Pied-Noir settlers have to leave the country? Well, as you know, it didn't pan out this way... Diehards of Algérie Française eventually set up the OAS terrorist outfit and screwed it up so much so that, in the end, ALL of the Pieds Noirs faced a single choice: "The suitcase or the coffin". That's Israel's worst-case scenario. A better, if not best, case scenario for Israel is South Africa's peaceful revolution: white settlers graciously handed over the political power to the black majority and most of them remained in South Africa, following the bloodless transition to democracy. But then, as I once pointed out, Nelson Mandela and the ANC were not offered a "rump democracy", they were not offered a token sovereignty over "East Johannesburg" nor a scattered territory dotted with white settlements --like in the West Bank and Gaza.... Re: Then there is another scenario. Creating a cause to attack Iran. This will be a danagerous game to play, and not worth it. Not worth it?! Well, I guess it depends on whose perspective you take... From Israel's perspective, an even more dangerous "game" would be to leave the Iranian caravan roll all the way up to the nuclear terminus while both the US and EU dogs bark. I'm afraid the only lifeline that Iran could safely rely upon is the India-China axis, with emphasis on China. The way I see it is that, somehow, Iran and Taiwan are linked --they really are bundled issues... I believe WWIII will stem from Iran's hybrid nature, that is, from Iran's being both a Middle East country AND an Asian one... Iran is actually a pivotal power straddling two worlds, the Middle East and (Central) Asia. Hence, a Judeofascist assault on Iran will disrupt Asia's balance of power as much as it will further upset the Middle East's.... Gus

To: Yaacov who wrote (8322)	5/14/2005 5:34:25 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 22250

Re: [Iran] is too vast. To invade them will take a million people, and the US ... public will not stand for it. Then again, on second thought.... May 23, 2005 Issue Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative The Lure of Military Society [The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, Andrew J. Bacevich, Oxford University Press, 270 pages] by Richard K. Betts [...] “Today as never before in their history,” the book relentlessly argues, “Americans are enthralled with military power.” They naïvely exaggerate its effectiveness, overlook its horror, romanticize the military profession, and accept the normalization of war as an instrument of policy. There is no single culprit in this shift, certainly not just the Bush administration and its neocons, although they get their fair share of blame. The march to militarism has been a bipartisan project into which various elites, popular culture, and religious movements have shepherded society and government institutions with scarcely a thought. To a degree unprecedented but now taken for granted, the purpose of the armed forces has shifted from defending American territory to projecting power abroad. Clear superiority over potential enemies is assumed to be insufficient; only worldwide supremacy is deemed adequate. (Bacevich might have added that only in America would we see a difference between national security—the business of the Defense Department, carried on far from our shores—and homeland security, requiring another new department to protect the country itself.) In popular consciousness, the 20th-century image of war as “barbarism, brutality, ugliness,” which “after 1914, only fascists dared to challenge,” the image of the modern battlefield as a slaughterhouse, has been replaced by a 21st-century high-tech image of war as clean—“surgical, frictionless, postmodern”—in which the heroes of the hit film “Top Gun” “never missed a meal and got sweaty only when they felt like it.” Among the laments that one suspects hits close to home for Bacevich is the fact that since “the demise of the ancient American tradition of the citizen-soldier,” war is no longer “participatory.” With military service having come to be a matter of personal choice rather than obligation, an attitude exemplified in the personal histories of Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton, Americans experience war only “vicariously.” The analysis behind all this proves solidly, sadly convincing. I find little with which to quarrel and only a bit over which to quibble—and the quibbles supplement the book’s argument more than challenge it. [...] amconmag.com