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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (717884)	12/12/2005 12:06:50 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769668

Israel could live with a fractured, failed Iraq Many Israelis reason that if the Baghdad government falls apart, the kind of threat posed by Saddam Hussein is unlikely to rise again. By Shlomo Avineri latimes.com Shlomo Avineri teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a former director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. December 4, 2005 MOST ISRAELIS supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. The prewar intelligence debate in the United States over whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003 doesn't excite them. Twice in the 1990s they donned gas masks in preparation for an attack from Iraq. What they know is that, in the 1980s, Iraq tried to develop nuclear weapons, that Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi Kurds and Iran — and that he hinted darkly about using it against Israel. To Israelis, Hussein looked a lot like Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Consequently, the French diplomatic minuets at the U.N. Security Council before the Iraq war didn't impress Israelis. After all, were not the French strong advocates of appeasement in the 1930s and then, under Vichy, Nazi collaborators? So Hussein's ouster removed a clear and present danger to Israel — and made it highly improbable that an eastern front of Iraq and Syria would form to threaten the country. Yet when it comes to the Bush administration's messianic faith in the transformative power of democracy in Iraq — and the Arab world in general — most Israelis are skeptical. In the last 20 years, democratization has swept through Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The results have been uneven: Russia is not Poland, Belarus is not Estonia. But the spread of democracy has largely skipped the Arab world. There has been no Arab Lech Walesa, no Arab Solidarity movement. Many Israelis do not believe that Islam is the cause of the Arab democratic deficit. After all, Turkey is an example of a Muslim-majority country slowly, steadily working through democratization. Indonesia and Bangladesh are others. Iran increasingly exhibits a vibrant civil society, and though its clerics exercise a stern hand, presidential and parliamentary elections are contested. The democratic deficit is an Arab phenomenon. Democracy in Iraq thus looks foreign not only because U.S.-led forces occupy the country but also because there is no legitimate Arab model for it. There is another reason for skepticism. In the 1920s, the British stitched together three disparate provinces of the old Ottoman Empire to form Iraq. Political power was vested in the hands of the Sunni Arabs, who never made up more than 20% of the overall population of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. The history of Iraq has been the story of Sunni Arab hegemony underpinned by the oppression of the other communities. In today's Iraq, some defeated Sunni Arabs are fighting a brutal insurrection to reclaim their hegemony. In doing so, they aim to thwart all efforts to create a viable political structure in which Sunnis are not dominant. The Dec. 15 elections will not change this. Nor will they change the determination of both Kurds and Shiites not to again be subjugated by the Sunnis. In truth, the elections are not a contest among political parties with platforms. Instead, they are a contest of ethnicities, and the votes will fall along those lines. As such, the elections are unlikely to end the insurrection. Is Israel worried about all this? Yes and no. Certainly it doesn't want to see failure in Iraq weakening U.S. power and prestige. But an Iraq split into three semi-autonomous mini-states, or an Iraq in civil war, means that the kind of threat posed by Hussein — an extremist nationalist dictator striving for WMD — is unlikely to rise again. The question is, how long will it take the U.S. to realize that Western-style democracy cannot be imported or imposed — and at what price will this realization come about? If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

To: goldworldnet who wrote (717884)	12/12/2005 12:08:45 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769668

Poll: Most Iraqis Oppose Troops' Presence By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer news.yahoo.com Most Iraqis disapprove of the presence of U.S. forces in their country, yet they are optimistic about Iraq's future and their own personal lives, according to a new poll. More than two-thirds of those surveyed oppose the presence of troops from the United States and its coalition partners and less than half, 44 percent, say their country is better off now than it was before the war, according to an ABC News poll conducted with Time magazine and other media partners. But Iraqis are surprisingly upbeat on many fronts, the poll suggests. Three-quarters say they are confident about the parliamentary elections scheduled for this week. More than two-thirds expect things in their country to get better in the coming months. Attitudes about Iraq's future were sharply different in the Sunni provinces and other parts of Iraq, however. Only a third in the Sunni regions were optimistic about their country's future. Shiites, who with the Kurds dominate the current parliament, had a much more positive view than the Sunnis of their own personal safety and whether their own lives are going well. A majority of both the Sunni and Shiite population say they favor a unified country, however. In other poll findings: _Two-thirds express confidence in the Iraqi army and in police. _Half now say the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was wrong, up from 39 percent in February 2004. _More than six in 10 say they feel safe in their neighborhoods, up from 40 percent in June 2004. _Six in 10 say local security is good, up from half in February 2004. But the national concern mentioned most often is security, named by 57 percent. A fourth of those surveyed, 26 percent, say U.S. forces should leave now, and another 19 percent say troops should leave after those chosen in this week's election take office. The other half say U.S. troops should stay until security is restored, 31 percent, until Iraqi forces can operate independently, 16 percent, or longer, 5 percent. The poll was conducted by Oxford Research International face-to-face with 1,711 Iraqis age 15 and over from Oct. 8 to Nov. 22. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. ___ On the Net: ABC News — abcnews.go.com