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

To: geode00 who wrote (194703)	8/3/2006 2:50:16 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

This is from an Op-Ed Contributor in today's NY Times... _____________________________________________________________ Ground to a Halt By ROBERT PAPE* Published: August 3, 2006 nytimes.com ISRAEL has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hezbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will learn that ground power won’t work either. The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Hezbollah is principally neither a political party nor an Islamist militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. At first it consisted of a small number of Shiites supported by Iran. But as more and more Lebanese came to resent Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah — never tight-knit — expanded into an umbrella organization that tacitly coordinated the resistance operations of a loose collection of groups with a variety of religious and secular aims. In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable to, say, a religious cult like the Taliban than to the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960’s. What made its rise so rapid, and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was not its international support but the fact that it evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese social groups. Evidence of the broad nature of Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hezbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks — which included the infamous bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 — involved 41 suicide terrorists. In writing my book on suicide attackers, I had researchers scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and the biographies of the Hezbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. Shockingly, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups like the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union. Three were Christians, including a female high-school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon. What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force. Thus the new Israeli land offensive may take ground and destroy weapons, but it has little chance of destroying the Hezbollah movement. In fact, in the wake of the bombings of civilians, the incursion will probably aid Hezbollah’s recruiting. Equally important, Israel’s incursion is also squandering the good will it had initially earned from so-called moderate Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The countries are the court of opinion that matters because, while Israel cannot crush Hezbollah, it could achieve a more limited goal: ending Hezbollah’s acquisition of more missiles through Syria. Given Syria’s total control of its border with Lebanon, stemming the flow of weapons is a job for diplomacy, not force. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, Sunni-led nations that want stability in the region, are motivated to stop the rise of Hezbollah. Under the right conditions, the United States might be able to help assemble an ad hoc coalition of Syria’s neighbors to entice and bully it to prevent Iranian, Chinese or other foreign missiles from entering Lebanon. It could also offer to begin talks over the future of the Golan Heights. But Israel must take the initiative. Unless it calls off the offensive and accepts a genuine cease-fire, there are likely to be many, many dead Israelis in the coming weeks — and a much stronger Hezbollah. *Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.”

To: geode00 who wrote (194703)	8/3/2006 3:43:39 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The British 9/11 Truth Campaign nineeleven.co.uk

To: geode00 who wrote (194703)	8/4/2006 8:37:23 AM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 281500

I just get the feeling that the boulder has already been dislodged, it's rolling downhill and we're just sitting around wondering if we should do more about trying to catch it. I agree. Precision prediction invariably must be wrong. There are too many combinations of effects, magnitude of effects and timing. Though it seems that refinements to the predictive models are getting worse and getting worse faster than anyone thought. We could have some big events that would cool things down. A major nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would have a cooling affect. jttmab

To: geode00 who wrote (194703)	8/4/2006 11:18:24 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Slouching toward the Apocalypse By Eugene Linden Special to the Los Angeles Times I 've written a good deal about global warming over the years, but like most people, I still have a hard time envisioning how we will know when the apocalypse arrives. Nobody will ring a bell to announce that a climate-change event has begun, and it's easy to ignore the signals that climate is changing. After all, we've always had extreme weather, and it's possible that what signifies the point of no return will not be in the realm of weather anyway but rather a derivative effect such as a financial crisis or crop failure. That's not to say that some future dramatic event such as the Greenland ice sheet sliding into the ocean won't happen, but it's more likely that global warming will creep up on us as the weather gradually unmoors from its normal patterns. Single events will be explained away. But at some point, the frequency, severity and ubiquity of the unusual weather will produce a sense of foreboding, a sense that something is happening beyond our control. What with killer heat waves, killer hurricanes and killer droughts, it's arguable that we've already passed that point. Indeed, I had that feeling of foreboding in the last week of June, as Washington gradually surrendered ground and the routines of daily life to incessant rain: Cars floated down ordinarily meek Rock Creek, government buildings flooded, the Metro was disrupted and roads were closed. You may have had the same feeling last week as the power dimmed and temperatures surged in Southern California and beyond. That said, the real, more insidious scenario might be that climate change will intrude on our lives like an omnipresent and ever more confiscatory taxman. Where they can, insurers and banks will pass weather risks to individuals and the government, making the costs of daily life more expensive. In some areas, housing might become uninsurable and unsalable, which in turn could cause a financial crisis. Municipal budgets and government safety nets will gradually succumb to the ever-increasing burden imposed by windstorms, floods, droughts and other weather extremes. Infectious diseases will thrive. The middle class will slowly find its savings and creature comforts stripped away, and the ordinary details of living, such as eating fresh vegetables and traveling to see family and friends, will become more expensive and uncertain. At some point it will dawn on us that the weather is making us poorer and sicker. Whether we are in Act 2 or Act 4 of a five-act climate drama, we are not the first to live out this play. At some point, for instance, the Moche elders, who lived in Peru 1,400 years ago, must have begun to wonder whether torrential El Nino-related rains were going to spell the doom of their civilization. Sometime during a 10-year stretch of intensely cold winters and short, cool summers, the Norse living in Greenland in A.D. 1350 must have begun to feel a sense of dread. In fact, that period was one harbinger of the Little Ice Age, which persisted for several hundred years. Now it's our turn. Like fugitives who must worry about every knock on the door, we can no longer dismiss events such as the late June rains and the July heat wave as just another instance of wacky weather. There's a distinct difference, though, between us and the Moche and the Norse, not to mention the Mayans, the Anasazi, the Akkadians and other players in previous episodes of climate chaos. All of them were victims of natural cycles; the evidence suggests that we wrote the script for this latest episode of climate roulette. It's easy to be condescending about past civilizations. They didn't have the science and technology that have enabled us to understand how climate works or to determine the role of climate in the collapse of their cultures in South America, the American Southwest and the Middle East. If only they knew what we now know about climate, maybe they would have adapted and survived. Then again, maybe not. We do know what we know, and still we do nothing. That's going to have future historians scratching their heads. clarionledger.com