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

To: Elroy who wrote (280277)	3/15/2006 1:48:08 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1570562

You cannot send this person a PM because they have you on Ignore or you have them on Ignore Trust me, I do not have you on ignore. I took you off ignore weeks ago. The system must be fouled up.

To: Elroy who wrote (280277)	3/15/2006 6:33:51 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1570562

Visiting Baghdad woman decries Iraq's fall into 'state of terror' By MEG LAUGHLIN Published March 15, 2006 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TAMPA - She kept thinking it couldn't get any worse in Baghdad. But it did - over and over. So pharmacist Entisar Mohammad Ariabi decided to come to the United States with a group of Iraqi women to tell what it's like to live through three years of war. After traveling to Jordan and getting a monthlong U.S. visa at the American Embassy in Amman, Ariabi arrived March 5 in the United States. She spoke in St. Petersburg on Tuesday night and is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. today at the University of South Florida. She will talk about how a city of air-conditioning, e-mail and fashionable restaurants disintegrated into explosions, gunfire and kidnapping. How the reassuring routine of day-to-day life in Baghdad became death and chaos, making people afraid to venture outside. And how she, her friends and the U.S. soldiers she knows have become increasingly depressed and bitter over the past three years. In a Monday phone interview through a translator, Ariabi told the St. Petersburg Times that the once-modern Baghdad hospital where she works has electricity and running water only for an hour a day now, so only a small number of wounded or ill civilians can be treated. "Those with at least a 70 percent chance of survival get attention," she said. "The rest we have to let die." Arms and legs are buried in the hospital courtyard because there is nothing else to do with them, she says. Diseases like cholera, typhoid and polio, not seen in Iraq in decades, have returned. Cancer patients go without treatment or painkillers. Burn wounds quickly turn into deadly infections because of a shortage of staff to keep them clean. Doctors and nurses are often attacked by desperate family members who can't bear to see loved ones suffer. "In Baghdad, we live in a state of terror," said Ariabi, who got to this country with help from a peace group called Code Pink. Ariabi said many Iraqis hoped for a better life when the United States invaded three years ago. Many Shiites and Kurds cheered U.S. soldiers for freeing them from the systematic terror, murder and oppression they had experienced under Saddam Hussein. But as bombings, shootings and kidnappings escalated against pro-American Iraqis and American troops, and the infrastructure of the country crumbled, many hopeful Iraqis despaired, she said. "We know the U.S. soldiers wanted to bring democracy, but they have unintentionally brought misery," she said. Ariabi, 48, is a Sunni and her husband is a Shiite. Like her son, she said many of her friends' families are mixed Sunni and Shiite who have always gotten along. "The American notion that there will be a Sunni-Shiite civil war here if the soldiers leave is misguided," she said. "The bombings and violence are to protest the occupation, not because Sunnis and Shiites hate each other." Ariabi's message: "It is time for the American soldiers to go home." In the early days of the war, Ariabi, her husband and five children were able to hold on to their lives, she said. Their 11-year-old-daughter went to swimming practice every afternoon. Their teenage boy surfed the Internet and e-mailed school pals. The older children studied French and English at the university. Every weekday, Ariabi returned from her hospital job, where she wore tailored business suits, and made dinners of meat and fresh vegetables, while the kids watched TV. They still live in their four-bedroom Mediterranean-style home of concrete and glass in a middle-class neighborhood of Baghdad. But little else from their former life is the same. "We did not know how light our lives were," she says. "We want them back." She returns to Baghdad at the end of March.

To: Elroy who wrote (280277)	3/15/2006 6:42:09 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1570562

Dubai and Dunces By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN When it came to the Dubai ports issue, the facts never really had a chance — not in this political season. Still, it's hard to imagine a more ignorant, bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate than the one indulged in by both Republicans and Democrats around this question of whether an Arab-owned company might oversee loading and unloading services in some U.S. ports. If you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid. We don't need any more pre-9/11 commissions. We need a post-9/11 commission, one that looks at all the big and little things we are doing — from sanctioning torture to warrantless wiretaps to turning our embassies abroad into fortresses — that over time could eat away at the core DNA of America. What is so crazy about the Dubai ports issue is that Dubai is precisely the sort of decent, modernizing model we should be trying to nurture in the Arab-Muslim world. But we've never really had an honest discussion about either the real problems out there or the real solutions, have we? The real problem was recently spelled out by an Arab-American psychiatrist, Dr. Wafa Sultan, in a stunning interview with Al Jazeera. Speaking about the Arab-Muslim world, Dr. Sultan said: "The clash we are witnessing ... is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings." The Jazeera host then asked: "I understand from your words that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?" Dr. Sultan: "Yes, that is what I mean." Dr. Sultan voiced truths that many Muslims know: their civilization is, in many places, in turmoil, falling further and further behind the world in science, education, industry and innovation, while falling deeper and deeper into the grip of crackpot clerics, tin-pot dictators, violent mobs and madmen like bin Laden and Saddam. President Bush keeps talking about Iraq and the Arab world as if democracy alone is the cure and all we need to do is get rid of a few bad apples. The problem is much deeper — we're dealing with a civilization that is still highly tribalized and is struggling with modernity. Mr. Bush was right in thinking it is important to help Iraq become a model where Arab Muslims could freely discuss their real problems, the ones identified by Dr. Sultan, and chart new courses. His crime was thinking it would be easy. I don't know how Iraq will end, but I sure know that we aren't going to repeat the Iraq invasion elsewhere anytime soon. Yet the need for reform in this region still cries out. Is there another way? Yes — nurturing internally generated Arab models for evolutionary reform, and one of the best is Dubai, the Arab Singapore. Dubai is not a democracy, and it is not without warts. But it is a bridge of decency that leads away from the failing civilization described by Dr. Sultan to a much more optimistic, open and self-confident society. Dubaians are building a future based on butter not guns, private property not caprice, services more than oil, and globally competitive companies, not terror networks. Dubai is about nurturing Arab dignity through success not suicide. As a result, its people want to embrace the future, not blow it up. What's ironic is that if Democrats who hate the Bush war in Iraq actually had a peaceful alternative policy for promoting transformation in the Arab-Muslim world, it would be called "the Dubai policy": supporting internally driven Arab engines of change. That's why Arab progressives are stunned by our behavior. As an Arab businessman friend said to me of the Dubai saga: "This deal has left a real bad taste in many mouths. I mean this was Dubai, for God's sake! You could not have a better friend and more of a symbol of globalization and openness. If they are a security danger to the U.S., then who is not?" So whatever happens with the Iraq experiment — but especially if it fails — we need Dubai to succeed. Dubai is where we should want the Arab world to go. Unfortunately, we just told Dubai to go to hell.