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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (222631)	3/6/2007 9:09:56 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Here I thought you had something new to propose. This is all old hat, and has been tried before. What I mean more precisely is that the ones whose votes really count, i.e., the ones passionate enough to fight for their choice, would overwhelm the passive preferences of the rest of the population. So, start with the violent takeover of the state by the passionate minority. Rough luck on the 95% who don't want it, but never mind. Let us examine the case of Iran. Now, its quite true that the Iranian people, having had 30 years of these bozos ruling them, are sick of Islamist extremism. But so what? Islamists aren't democrats. Once in, they take monopoly over the guns and they stay in, becoming as brutal and autocratic as the regime they replaced, leading perhaps in time to another passionate minority... As for their having home addresses, who, watching the case of Iran, will be dumb enough to attack the west with his OWN forces? They will look at Iran and Arafat's career, and be sure to create some force with deniability - it always works! Hizbullah has killed hundreds of US soldiers, has Tehran ever paid a price? Now they are trying to take over Lebanon, again great success. Arabs too can compare results between attacking with armies and attacking with terrorists, and draw the obvious conclusions. As for your assertion that Islamists become rational authoritarians once in office, let's just say the jury's still out on that one. The President of Iran is not sounding too rational lately. If Iran were rational, should they not have welcomed the rise of a Shiite controlled state in Iraq, and worked to make it their client? But no, they hate the US too much. If Hamas were rational, should they not have made some meaningless promises about honoring previously signed agreements? But no, their ideology won't let them. Which leads us to the last point, can these guys be left alone? We left the Taliban alone. We left Iran alone. From the first we got 9/11, from the second Hizbullah. These guys do not leave other people alone, because they have an ideology - not of "blind hatred" but of jihad - sanctified world conquest. Jihadis don't hate infidels, they just want to make them submit to Allah for their own good. They're doing them a favor. Now you want to give these guys control of the world's oil supply. Added to the ideology you have the fact that Islamists cannot run a state, so they need a scapegoat to blame. The West is the traditional one - by which they mean everything from the Crusaders to the Spanish to the British Empire to America all rolled up into one package, a one-size-fits-all explanation for why the rulers cannot return the population to those glorious caliphate that never was. Israel is really just a side note to this traditional, unless they decide to roll Israel in by claiming that the Elders of Zion really control the West. There are some cures that are worse than the disease. Everyone of these arguments could have been used, and with greater force and legitimacy too, on why we should have been happy to see the Nazis take power in Germany. <I suspect those who said to build a wall had it right but you have to build it high, you have to guarantee Israel's existence, you have to get Israel to stop retaliating against populations for the actions of the terrorists, and Israel has to make concessions that will allow the establishment of a Palestinian state that can actually survive economically, politically and socially It should be staringly obvious by now even to you that the Palestinians leaders don't want a state. They see it as a shameful defeat that the West is trying to foist on them. Borders, control, etc. have nothing to do with the case. As long as Israel still exists, they have lost. This was true for Fatah and goes double for Hamas. I am reminded of Orwell's great line, "There are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe in them." But then, in those days the Left was anti-fascist.