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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299296)	8/11/2006 6:56:53 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579777

re: Worked for Spain, no? No. They were on their way out of Iraq anyway. re: Britain is next I hope so. re: All to isolate America in the war on terror and get the whole world blaming America for the mess in the Middle East. They don't have to "get the whole world" anything. The whole world knows we are largely responsible. re: No one is arguing against police actions, but that will never prevent 100% of the terrorism attacks against us. All the terrorists have to do is keep trying and trying until they succeed. True. But armies occupying Mideast soil will only increase terrorist attacks against us. re: So now what? Since you think America and Britian is causing terrorism against us, it's obvious what your long-term position is ... appeasement. Appeasement? Getting our occupying force out of Iraq, where it had no business or claim in the first place, is appeasement? Give me a break.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299296)	8/11/2006 7:20:56 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579777

Editorial The London Plot For almost five years now, we have carried around the legacy of Sept. 11. There is no sunny morning that does not revive its memory. The news of a terrorist plot against America-bound airliners yesterday called up feelings that are never all that far below the surface. There is nothing Americans want more than to win the war on terror, to come to a place where people no longer feel it is a fine thing to forfeit their own lives and the lives of innocents in order to make the world notice their anger and frustration. It is a point on which the country is absolutely undivided. It is one matter about which subway commuters, airline passengers and mall shoppers feel no irony or cynicism whatsoever. It comes like a punch to the gut, at times like these, when our leaders blatantly use the nation’s trauma for political gain. We never get used to this. It never feels like business as usual. On Wednesday, when the administration already knew that British agents were rounding up suspects in what they believed was a plot to blow up planes en route to the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney had a telephone interview with reporters to discuss the defeat of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in a Democratic primary. Mr. Cheney went off on a rather rambling disquisition, but its main point was clear: In rejecting Mr. Lieberman, who supported the war in Iraq, the Democrats were encouraging “the Al Qaeda types.” Within the Democratic ranks, the vice president added, “there’s a significant body of opinion that wants to go back — I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/11 mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in.” The man who beat Mr. Lieberman, Ned Lamont, lives in Greenwich, a suburb full of commuters who work in New York high-rise buildings. They are completely aware of the way international terrorism can come crashing down on an ordinary family, leaving the survivors stunned and bereft. A dozen of their neighbors died at the World Trade Center. They will never be able to go back to a “pre-9/11 mind-set.” But that did not seem to deter Mr. Lieberman from scoring a cheap sound bite yesterday. Leaving Iraq, as Mr. Lamont advocates, “will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,” he said. “It will strengthen them and they will strike again.” Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we could do that without turning this into a political game plan. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299296)	8/11/2006 7:27:45 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1579777

There’s an overwhelming consensus among national security experts that the war in Iraq has undermined, not strengthened, the fight against terrorism. Yet yesterday Mr. Lieberman, sounding just like Dick Cheney — and acting as a propaganda tool for Republicans trying to Swift-boat the party of which he still claims to be a member — suggested that the changes in Iraq policy that Mr. Lamont wants would be “taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.” Nonsense and Sensibility By PAUL KRUGMAN After Ned Lamont’s victory in Connecticut, I saw a number of commentaries describing Joe Lieberman not just as a “centrist” — a word that has come to mean “someone who makes excuses for the Bush administration” — but as “sensible.” But on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered sensible? Take a look at Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco,” the best account yet of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. The prime villain in that book is Donald Rumsfeld, whose delusional thinking and penchant for power games undermined whatever chances for success the United States might have had. Then read Mr. Lieberman’s May 2004 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, “Let Us Have Faith,” in which he urged Mr. Rumsfeld not to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, because his removal “would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America’s presence in Iraq.” And that’s just one example of Mr. Lieberman’s bad judgment. He has been wrong at every step of the march into the Iraq quagmire — all the while accusing anyone who disagreed with him of endangering national security. Again, on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered “sensible”? But I know the answer: on Planet Beltway. Many of those lamenting Mr. Lieberman’s defeat claim that they fear a takeover of our political parties by extremists. But if political polarization were really their main concern, they’d be as exercised about the primary challenge from the right facing Lincoln Chafee as they are about Mr. Lieberman’s woes. In fact, however, the sound of national commentary on the Rhode Island race is that of crickets chirping. So what’s really behind claims that Mr. Lieberman is sensible — and that those who voted against him aren’t? It’s the fact that many Washington insiders suffer from the same character flaw that caused Mr. Lieberman to lose Tuesday’s primary: an inability to admit mistakes. Imagine yourself as a politician or pundit who was gung-ho about invading Iraq, and who ridiculed those who warned that the case for war was weak and that the invasion’s aftermath could easily turn ugly. Worse yet, imagine yourself as someone who remained in denial long after it all went wrong, disparaging critics as defeatists. Now denial is no longer an option; the neocon fantasy has turned into a nightmare of fire and blood. What do you do? You could admit your error and move on — and some have. But all too many Iraq hawks have chosen, instead, to cover their tracks by trashing the war’s critics. They say: Pay no attention to the fact that I was wrong and the critics have been completely vindicated by events — I’m “sensible,” while those people are crazy extremists. And besides, criticizing any aspect of the war encourages the terrorists. That’s what Joe Lieberman said, and it’s what his defenders are saying now. Now, it takes a really vivid imagination to see Mr. Lieberman’s rejection as the work of extremists. I know that some commentators believe that anyone who thinks the Iraq war was a mistake is a flag-burning hippie who hates America. But if that’s true, about 60 percent of Americans hate America. The reality is that Ned Lamont and those who voted for him are, as The New York Times editorial page put it, “irate moderates,” whose views are in accord with those of most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats. But in his non-concession speech, Mr. Lieberman described Mr. Lamont as representative of a political tendency in which “every disagreement is considered disloyal” — a statement of remarkable chutzpah from someone who famously warned Democrats that “we undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.” The question now is how deep into the gutter Mr. Lieberman’s ego will drag him. There’s an overwhelming consensus among national security experts that the war in Iraq has undermined, not strengthened, the fight against terrorism. Yet yesterday Mr. Lieberman, sounding just like Dick Cheney — and acting as a propaganda tool for Republicans trying to Swift-boat the party of which he still claims to be a member — suggested that the changes in Iraq policy that Mr. Lamont wants would be “taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.” In other words, not only isn’t Mr. Lieberman sensible, he may be beyond redemption.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (299296)	8/11/2006 7:33:16 AM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1579777

Here There Be Monsters By AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER Leeds, England KNOWING what to be scared of is, sadly, a skill we all need. But South Koreans seem a bit confused about this, judging from what’s making waves in Seoul right now. First, the real world. Last week, the semiofficial Yonhap news agency raised the alarm about a new report on North Korea’s missile threat compiled by a researcher at a foreign ministry think tank called the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. According to the author, Yun Deok-min, the July 4 missile tests that caused an international furor were just part of a major expansion of Kim Jong-il’s capacity to menace his neighbors. All along its east coast, the report noted, North Korea is building underground missile bases and silos. As the geography suggests, the main target is Japan, including American military bases there. Mr. Yun claimed that some 200 Rodong missiles (with a range of up to 1,300 miles, enough to reach anywhere in Japan) and 50 SSN-6 missiles (range of up to 2,500 miles) are already in place. Two new bases under construction in the northeastern part of the country are thought to be for the Taepodong-2, a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile, which in theory could reach Alaska (although the July 4 test was, fortunately, pretty much a flop). Lest South Koreans feel left out, the Dear Leader has not forgotten them. The report indicated that about 600 short-range Scud missiles are based just 30 miles north of the paradoxically named demilitarized zone and aimed at all of South Korea’s strategic targets and industrial complexes. That’s on top of 11,200 artillery pieces, some apparently outfitted with chemical shells, ever ready to pulverize greater Seoul and its 20 million inhabitants. So are South Koreans scared of the menace to the north? Nope. It’s summer, and they are going to the movies in droves — to scare themselves about something quite different. “Guimul” (“The Host”) is a monster movie, and a monster hit, drawing a record audience of 6 million — equivalent to one in eight South Koreans — in its first 11 days. It’s about a child-snatching mutant that rears up into Seoul out of the Han River, spawned by toxic fluid carelessly discharged from — guess where — an American military base. Harmless fiction? Not quite. The director, Bong Joon-ho, says he based it on an incident in 2000 when a mortician with the United States military was arrested over a discharge of formaldehyde. Though the incident was regrettable, the uproar it created was out of proportion. There was no lasting pollution, much less any monsters. But the theme rumbles on. The United States is returning 59 military bases to South Korea, which has complained that many have unacceptable soil pollution (Washington says it’s being held to an unfair standard). The allies have been wrangling for two years about who will clean up. Now environmental groups and anti-American partisans are milking “Guimul” for political gain, and the minister of the environment, Lee Chi-beom, says he is worried that the sentiments spurred by the movie could make it harder to reach any agreement on the bases. There are echoes here of a 2002 case in which a United States military truck killed two schoolgirls on a narrow country road. The driver’s acquittal by a court-martial led to weeks of protests and were a major factor in the election of President Roh Moo-hyun, who let it be known that he would not “kowtow” to Washington. While the accident was a tragedy, one had to wonder why it could incite so many South Koreans to take to the streets while the daily death toll of North Korean children from famine and conditions in Mr. Kim’s gulags sparked no such protests. To an outsider, South Koreans seem to have a double standard in terms of threat perceptions. Having been fed propaganda for years by military regimes that painted North Korea as an evil monster poised to devour them, they now seem to dismiss even factual claims as cold war scare stories. Many of them see North Korea as a slightly delinquent brother who needs to be cajoled into better manners. China, too, is viewed more positively than it is by most of its other neighbors. By contrast, American motives tend to be suspect, and wicked Japan can do nothing right. (The Roh administration’s first reaction to the North’s missile tests was not to condemn Mr. Kim but to criticize Japan for making “such a fuss.”) It’s not self-evident, to say the least, that this perceived hierarchy of threats is in South Korea’s true national interest. Without reviving the old knee-jerk demonization of North Korea, South Koreans might at least be given pause by the foreign ministry report that says the regime “has made all-out efforts to bolster asymmetrical strengths at a time when millions of its people have died of hunger.” I suppose we shouldn’t begrudge either South Koreans’ yearning for national reconciliation or their summer thrills. But maybe theycould think a little more deeply about where the real monsters are. Aidan Foster-Carter is an honorary senior research fellow on Korea at Leeds University.