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

To: geode00 who wrote (226402)	4/7/2007 8:19:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

President Carter: Bush Ordered Me Not to Go to Damascus harpers.org BY Scott Horton PUBLISHED April 6, 2007 More evidence of the White House's partisan manipulation of relations with Syria emerged yesterday, as President Jimmy Carter told a gathering in New York about his recent request to visit Syrian President Assad. The former president stated: “I have known President Bashar al-Assad since he was a college student, and I thought it might be helpful if I went and urged him to support the peace process in the Middle East. But for the only time in my life as a former president, I was ordered by the White House not to go.” The White House has had no criticism of three Republican Congressmen who are currently also visiting Syria. Indeed, one of them – Rep. Darrell Issa of California - sharply criticized President Bush after emerging from his meeting with Assad, something which Pelosi carefully avoided. Attacks on Pelosi have also now regularly featured photographs of her wearing a headscarf, coupled with suggestions that she is engaged in "appeasement" of Islamic extremists. Joe Conason assesses the attacks in a column at Salon.com this morning. He states: As for the headscarf, which Pelosi wore while visiting a mosque and a marketplace, there could be no conceivable reason to vilify this natural gesture of respect -- except to excite religious and ethnic bigotry. Women have been covering their heads upon entering certain places for hundreds of years, and so have men for that matter. Nobody complains when an American politician puts on a yarmulke in a synagogue or an American woman covers her bare arms in a cathedral, and nobody should. No, the war against Pelosi is a rear-guard assault by the White House against moderates and liberals in both political parties who understand that the failed Bush policies have jeopardized American interests and hurt the Mideast peace process. What Wolf and Pelosi have in common is their endorsement of the Iraq Study Group's proposals, which emphasize regional diplomacy, including direct talks with both Syria and Iran. Indeed, it was Wolf who first approached James Baker about undertaking the Iraq report, and who sponsored the legislation that paid for the group's work. The malice behind these attacks leaves the clear impression that the "war party" is still at the helm in the White House, and that military confrontation with Syria is still given a priority ahead of talking. This belies the president's muddled statements about pursuing a dialogue with Syria. _____________________________________________________________ To Damascus with Nancy Pelosi Why neocons are so apoplectic about the speaker's visit to Syria. By Joe Conason Salon.com April 6, 2007 \| With her brief visit to Syria, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has provoked an outburst of flaming hysteria from the Bush administration, as well as from the neoconservatives who fashioned its ruinous war and failed foreign policies. The screaming critics of the speaker charge her with undermining presidential power, freelancing Mideast diplomacy, appeasing a terrorist regime and even surrendering to Islamist radicalism by donning a head scarf. By merely meeting with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, Pelosi supposedly proved that she was eager to promote irresponsible partisanship at the cost of national unity and constitutional order. In the New York Post she was accused of "making a date with a terrorist." On the NewsMax site she was portrayed as "appeasing dictators in the Middle East." In the Washington Post she was ridiculed for attempting to mount a "shadow presidency." And on CNN, she was mocked for planting a "big wet kiss" on Assad as a "publicity stunt." Yet those furious complaints were all false and, more important, beside the point. The problem is not what Pelosi did or said, but how she exposed the exhaustion of neoconservative policy. As most of her critics surely know, there is nothing outrageous or even unusual about a meeting between a foreign head of state and a member of Congress. Indeed, she was preceded on the road to Damascus by Rep. Frank Wolf, a prominent Virginia Republican who led a GOP delegation to meet with Assad, and she was soon followed by Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican whose remarks after seeing the Syrian leader were sharply critical of the Bush White House. Pelosi was attacked for her remarks about the possibility of peace talks between Syria and Israel, as if this radical prospect had never been broached before. Before arriving in Damascus, she had met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and addressed the Knesset, pledging Democratic support for the defense of the Jewish state. Although Olmert later attempted to embarrass Pelosi by declaring that he had given her no message for Assad, his own spokeswoman issued a statement after their meeting on April 1, which clearly indicated that they had discussed what she might say to the Syrian president. According to that statement, Olmert told her that he would enter negotiations with Assad only if Syria withdrew its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. There is no evidence that Pelosi said anything different in Damascus. Why she expressed optimism about eventual peace talks between the Syrians and the Israelis remains to be seen. The speaker's rather bland remarks in Syria were no more provocative than the statement released by Wolf, who has not suffered any specific denunciation from the White House or the right-wing claque for his separate visit to Syria. "We came because we believe there is an opportunity for dialogue," he said, speaking for himself and Reps. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., and Joseph Pitts, R-Pa. Rep. Issa went further, bluntly rebuking the Bush administration for failing to encourage such a dialogue with Assad. As for the headscarf, which Pelosi wore while visiting a mosque and a marketplace, there could be no conceivable reason to vilify this natural gesture of respect -- except to excite religious and ethnic bigotry. Women have been covering their heads upon entering certain places for hundreds of years, and so have men for that matter. Nobody complains when an American politician puts on a yarmulke in a synagogue or an American woman covers her bare arms in a cathedral, and nobody should. No, the war against Pelosi is a rear-guard assault by the White House against moderates and liberals in both political parties who understand that the failed Bush policies have jeopardized American interests and hurt the Mideast peace process. What Wolf and Pelosi have in common is their endorsement of the Iraq Study Group's proposals, which emphasize regional diplomacy, including direct talks with both Syria and Iran. Indeed, it was Wolf who first approached James Baker about undertaking the Iraq report, and who sponsored the legislation that paid for the group's work. The neoconservatives, both within and outside the White House, resent Pelosi for publicly dissenting from their ideology of war and their rejection of diplomacy. Their own vision has collapsed in ruins; they have gravely harmed the American military and discredited the ideals of democracy, and they have run out of ideas. That sucking sound is the vacuum of their minds. Now in their bankruptcy, they can only smear those who, like Speaker Pelosi, are attempting to promote a bipartisan alternative. Let us hope she possesses the courage to continue that crucial mission.

To: geode00 who wrote (226402)	4/8/2007 2:40:02 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hot and Cold _________________________________________________________ Lead Editorial The New York Times April 8, 2007 Last week began with a Supreme Court decision declaring that the federal government had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and all but ordering the Bush administration to do so. It ended with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s authoritative voice on global warming — warning that failure to contain these emissions will have disastrous environmental effects, especially in poorer countries, which are least able to defend themselves and their people against the consequences of climate change. One would hope that these events would shake President Bush out of his state of denial and add his authority to the chorus of governors, legislators and business leaders calling for an aggressive regulatory and technological response to the dangers of global warming. They haven’t. When asked about the Supreme Court decision, the president said he thought he was already doing enough. He argued further that there was little point in the United States’ doing any more unless other polluters like China acted as well. That ignores the reality that no developing country is going to move unless the United States — which produces one-fourth of the world’s emissions with only 5 percent of its population — takes the lead. The report from the intergovernmental panel was the second of three due this year. The first concluded with “90 percent certainty” that humans had caused the rise in atmospheric temperatures over the last half-century. The most recent focused on the consequences, few of them positive. The northern latitudes will have longer growing seasons. But elsewhere climate change will lead to more severe storms, the flooding of tropical islands and coastlines inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, the likely extinction of at least one-fourth of the world’s species and, in poorer countries in Asia and Africa, drought and hunger. Some of these changes have begun. “We’re no longer arm-waving with models,” said Martin Parry, the co-chairman of the team that wrote the report. But the report also makes clear that while emissions already accumulated in the atmosphere make some damage inevitable, the worst can be avoided if the world’s nations take swift action to stabilize and then reverse emissions. What must be avoided, the report said, is a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, the point at which truly devastating effects will begin to kick in. But such a rise is almost inevitable over the next century if the world continues to do business as usual. The panel’s next paper will discuss alternatives to business as usual. These policies will almost certainly require a major shift in the way energy is produced and used, as well as massive investments in new technologies. They will also be expensive. But what the world’s scientists are telling us, with increasing confidence, is that the costs of doing nothing will be far greater than the costs of acting now.

To: geode00 who wrote (226402)	4/9/2007 7:13:47 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Iraqi's book takes on U.S. mismanagement news.yahoo.com By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent Sun Apr 8, 4:50 PM ET NEW YORK - In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators." "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Ali A. Allawi concludes in "The Occupation of Iraq," newly published by Yale University Press. Allawi writes with authority as a member of that "new order," having served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment. The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal. It's an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word "ignorance" crops up repeatedly. First came the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without "the faintest idea" of Iraq's realities. "More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society," he writes. What followed was the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders: • The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance. • Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time. • An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq's many state-owned enterprises. • The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business. • Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders. • The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget. In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington's "micromanagement." Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship. On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath." For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq's explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance. The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq's "new order," including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done. As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, "America's only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise."