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

To: Lou Weed who wrote (240828)	9/3/2007 11:48:34 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<<So now that Arafat's gone, you're going to assign all the blame to him alone?>> Not at all....you're jumping to conclusions. There's blame to go all around. I never assigned blame to him alone. He was a major hinderence but not the sole reason for failure. You said the talks were guaranteed to fail as long as Arafat was the negotiator. That's more than a mere hindrance. As I pointed out, Arafat was immovable as long as he lived. Since he didn't die until late 2004, your insistence that Bush negotiate in his first term was in retrospect, insistence that he too engage in fruitless negotiations that were doomed to fail. <<It won't get resolved, unless (God forbid) Israel gets destroyed and the Jews get killed or driven out>> Do you really believe that this is possible? Unfortunately yes. It wouldn't be a rational decision to attempt it, but history is replete with irrational deciisions, particularly when you have regimes led by dictators wtih bad information and/or religions missions. Plenty of both in the Muslim world today. Israel has enough nukes to destroy all the Arab nations 100 times over. This whole driving the jews into the sea is a fallacy that will never happen. I devoutly hope so. But surely you can recognize that the salient factor is not what I believe or you believe, but what the Arab and Iranian rulers believe that drives this equation. If THEY believe it's possible, why should they settle for less, especially as we both agree that they LIKE the conflict? They regard the conflict as net-net beneficial to their rule. So that gives them a lot more disincentive than incentive to settle on a compromise, especially as they have done ZERO to prepare the people for compromise, just the opposite in fact. Remember, Israel does not have "enough nukes to destroy all the Arab nations 100 times over" or anything like that, and it is unknown if Israel will really have the will to commit a second strike if Tel Aviv is nuked. The former President of Iran, Rafsanjani, is on record saying that a nuclear exchange would be an acceptable tradeoff since one bomb could destroy Israel but the Muslim world could recover. The Arabs have no experience of modern total war. They never felt the battles of WWI or WWII on their own skin. And the Government of Iran keeps saying that the Mahdi will come back inside a couple of years. It's possible they don't mind the prospect of a nuclear exchange; that they don't understand that it would really be all that different from what Iran suffered in the Iran-Iraq war or Baghdad suffers now. Remember, the current Iranian regime is the same regime that sent human waves of teenage boys with plastic keys to heaven around their necks out to clear minefields with their bodies. And one of the men who trained (if that's the right word) those boys and send them out was the current President Ahmedinijad. This regime has very little regard for human life. Managing the conflict is appeasement for the hardliners on both sides. For the Arabs it justifies open animosity and non-recognition of the state of Israel. It doesn't need to justify the animosity and non-recognition; they came first and caused the conflict. What you are saying is that we can destroy the cause by removing the effect. This is exactly backwards. Come on, come on, you've already admitted that negotiating with Arafat was hopeless and the Arab regimes like the conflict. Now just take one little step more and admit that the Arabs and Iranians DO have hope of destroying Israel. They hoped to do it in 48 and 67 and 73; they hope to do it with suicide bombers, and they openly say they hope to do it with nuclear weapons. Their hope is tied up with their religion, which tells them that Allah wills it that Muslim land should always remain Muslim land. The tragedy of Al-Andalus must not be repeated in Palestine, as Osama bin Laden put it.