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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (236706)	6/10/2005 8:45:49 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572719

I found some statements by a Lebanese historian by the name of Kemal Salibi that supports what I have been trying to explain to you and others about the Middle East: "The liberal tradition in the West tries to impute to the behavior of the native or the underdog an idealist position which is not really there. They want to think of the peoples of this region as 'noble savages,' as Jean-Jeacques Rousseau put it. Instead of saying, what we have here is an outmoded form of thinking clashing with an attempt to construct modern nation states...When it comes to thinking about Middle East politics, the American liberal mind is often chasing rainbows. They are living in a world of delusion." When did Rousseau live.......the 18th century? Is it not possible that liberals may have changed in 200 years? As a liberal, I see nothing noble about the insurgents in Iraq. The only thing I have said is that I am saddened to see 14 year kids get snookered into the fighting and end up dead on the streets of Iraq..........a comment which saddam jr. has reposted numberous times to show that I am not loyal to my country. I have no delusions as to who the Iraqis are..........I have said repeatedly that the ME is a tough neighborhood and we can't begin to understand their mindset. I also pulled a quote from Thomas Friedman, who has 30 years of reporting experience in the Middle East: "They [Western observers of the Middle East] assume that all the surface trappings of nation-statehood (the parliaments, the flags, and the democratic rhetoric) can fully explain the politics of these countries, and that tribalism and brutal authoritarianism are now either things of the past or aberrations from the norm; the lesson of Hama or Halabja or South Yemen is that they are not." If you believe like Friedman, why were you so gung-ho to invade Iraq? I had no illusions about Iraq.......that's why I was vehemently against going in there. I argued for weeks with Ten, Tim, David Ray et al. So please, don't throw up lessons to me that you are just now learning. I have never been a proponent for nation building. I firmly believe that a nation has its own manifest destiny and must be left alone to achieve it. And frankly, I think that's the general view of most liberals. ted