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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (13447)	8/18/2007 10:17:34 AM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

True. The following conservative does quite well on talk shows...in his latest article he appears to agree w/Giuliani that attempting to create a US-type democracy in the ME is a stretch: >Mideast Muslims aren't American Methodists By Rich Lowry, Aug 18 2007 In September 1898, an outnumbered British-led army battled the forces of a Muslim fanatic in Omdurman, Sudan. The Brits unleashed machine-gun fire and artillery on the primitive warriors and suffered a loss of 48 dead and 434 wounded, while killing 9,700, wounding 13,000 and capturing 5,000 of the enemy. Winston Churchill, who was present, called it "the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians." The British ruled Sudan for another five decades. In October 1993, badly outnumbered American troops battled the forces of a Somali clan leader in Mogadishu. We unleashed machine-gun fire and helicopter gunships on the primitive warriors and suffered 18 fatalities and 73 wounded to as many 5,500 Somali killed and wounded. It was a fight nearly as lopsided as the Battle of Omdurman, but the U.S. was out of Somalia within a year. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the revenge of the tribes. For hundreds of years, the result -- with some spectacular exceptions -- of a clash between modern and primitive armies was a bloodbath and disorienting humiliation for the primitive forces. When Inca emperor (and sun god) Atahualpa ventured out into battle in 1532 with a force of 80,000 against an invading Spanish contingent of 168, he was immediately captured and eventually executed. Now, tribes, clans, and primitives of all sorts represent one of the most intractable problems in the war on terror. Throughout the past century, the rules and goals of the West have changed. We are thankfully no longer as comfortable slaughtering people, and we no longer want to directly govern third-world areas. Our goal, on humanitarian and -- since Sept. 11 -- on security grounds is to create decent indigenous governing authorities where otherwise chaos would reign. And this is the problem -- tribes and clans can't beat back a conquering Western army but they can, quite naturally, frustrate attempts to govern them. In western Pakistan, Gaza, southern and eastern Afghanistan, Somalia, and western Iraq, it has been ungoverned spaces that have created the environment in which terrorists can thrive. Our problem in the war on terror is less the absence of democracy than the absence of strong states. Tribes are inherently difficult to govern because they, as James Kurth writes in The American Interest, "do not see themselves as citizens who enjoy equal rights within one homogeneous nation," but as "at most a collection of nations in a nation, but not of it." This is why even the mind-bogglingly brutal Saddam Hussein had trouble handling the tribes of Iraq. The extraordinary progress we have seen in Iraq in the past six months has less to do with winning new converts to our ideological vision of liberal democracy, and more with how we have -- through inspired and very practical work at the local level -- turned the tribes in our favor. We have greased palms, stroked egos, and benefited from the excesses of an al Qaeda so savage and dark that it represents a threat even to the not particularly gentle or enlightened way of life of the tribes. President Bush doesn't appear to have entirely absorbed this. He still insists that Muslims desire freedom as much as Methodists do. This may well be true of Muslims who are as deracinated as most Methodists are -- living in societies that have dissolved traditional ties of clan and sect to make possible the individualism upon which modern liberal democracies are built. Most Muslims in the Middle East don't live in such societies, of course, and creating them would represent a radical social revolution almost as threatening to tribal sheiks as the vision of al Qaeda. What we are instead witnessing in Iraq is a necessary American accommodation to people for whom blood and soil mean much more than constitutional rights or democratic procedure. Is that ideal? No, but consider it part of the revenge of the tribes.<

To: Brumar89 who wrote (13447)	8/18/2007 1:07:17 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

ACLU is not the public..this must be a Democrat dingbat: >Judge:Feds must answer ACLU demands WASHINGTON (AP) — The government must answer a watchdog group's demands to release records about the nation's classified terrorist spying program, the chief judge of a secretive national security court has ruled. The American Civil Liberties Union, which announced the order Friday, said it was the first time the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had responded to a request filed by the public. In her 2-page order, dated Aug. 16, Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called the ACLU's demand "an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing." The ACLU last week asked the court to explain publicly the need to revamp laws that expand the government's authority to spy on foreigners. The request was prompted by Congress' approval earlier this month of legislation updating the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the government to eavesdrop on terror suspects who are believed to be foreigners without first getting a court warrant. The overhaul, according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, was the result of the court's ruling in January to bring the program under its authority — effectively banning eavesdropping on foreigners when their messages were routed through communications carriers based in the United States. The ACLU wants that ruling to be released publicly — which would be an unusual move by the court that deals almost entirely with classified information. It remains unclear whether the court records will ever be unsealed. Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Justice Department to respond to the ACLU's request by Aug. 31. If Justice officials want to seal parts of their response, the government must explain why to the court, which will have the final say. In turn, the ACLU must answer the government's response by Sept. 14. "While our motion may be unprecedented, we are responding to an unprecedented situation, where Congress has just granted the president sweeping new authorities," said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. "And yet nobody knows why or even whether the authority was needed at all." Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the government's attorneys are reviewing the order and declined further comment.<