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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (27242)	12/24/1998 6:57:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

Agreed on pretty much all counts. Interesting to note that one of the beneficial results of the Gulf War is that it restored America's credibility as a guarantor of security for either Israel or a Palestinian state. My own guess is that moderates probably now outnumber radicals in both Israel and the Arab world, and that an awful lot of people are getting very serious about peace. There are huge amounts of face involved, though, and the mutual backing down will take years of delicate handling. And as you say, there are fanatics on both sides who will do anything in their power - which includes some pretty ugly tricks - to derail the process. Just hope both sides have the balls to stay the course. Not sure that a nuclear threat is the only explanation for Saddam's stopping in Kuwait. I'm not convinced that he ever intended to move into Saudi Arabia at that time. I do think that if his seizure of Kuwait had gone without an effective challenge he would have taken the next bite quite quickly. I suspect that Saddam believed that the US would not be able to put together an effective coalition with Arab states, and that he could disrupt a coalition by drawing Israel into the fight and placing Arab coalition members in the untenable position of fighting on the same side as the Zionists. The plan failed because the US kept the Israelis grounded (one imagines that substantial leverage was applied), and because Arab leaders, when push came to shove, were more afraid of Saddam than of the US. Not a bad plan, though, and it could easily have worked. Not a region well suited to simplistic analysis. Steve

To: nihil who wrote (27242)	12/26/1998 8:08:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<Their dangerous Arab neighbors are thugs and psychopaths -- totally untrustworthy.> Nihil, saying something like that is extremely racist and is typical of the same kind of thinking that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Israel pushed itself unwanted into the middle of a bunch of Arab countries by force, massacring whole villages of Palestinians to make sure that hundreds of thousands of others were so frightened that they fled to neighboring countries for protection, where many of them still live in camps several generations later. While the Israelis were well armed, the Palestinians were not even allowed to defend themselves or their land, where they had been living peacefully for thousands of years. In columnist Bob Novak's column today, which is unfortunately not yet available on the web for me to cite for you, he discusses the outrage of large numbers of American Zionists at Bill Clinton and Al Gore because Clinton compared the pain of Palestinian children to that of Israeli children whose fathers are in prison for war crimes. There is, in fact, a nascent movement to punish Gore and find a Democratic opponent in the presidential primaries to run against him, who is more deferential to the Jews. This is that sickening Jewish lobby I have mentioned before that some people deny exists. Now anyone who has any sensitivity or objectivity at all would realize that Palestinian children suffer just like Israeli ones do, but the Zionists believe that they are far superior to anyone else. The reason I am bringing this up is that your comment seems to reflect a similar mind set, where Jews are far superior to Arabs.