| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:43 am Post subject: Bush's dangerous arrogance |
| Subj: Bush's dangerous arrogance
Date: 4/18/04 4:02:05 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jblankfort@earthlink.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
What is significant about this article, apart from its contents, is that its author is a veteran correspondent who has been unabashedly pro-American.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1194276,00.html
Bush's dangerous arrogance
HenryPorter
Sunday April 18, 2004
The Observer
Somewhere in the mesmerising performance by RobertS.McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary, in the film The Fog of War, he says: 'America has no friends, only allies.'
It's a phrase that should be chiselled into the Cabinet table because each new Prime Minister believes that the special relationship, a phrase that is unrecognised in the States, entails special favours, access and status.
Any such illusion must have disintegrated for Blair last week after Sharon and Bush, operating in the exclusive club of their victimhood, made an announcement about the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Naturally, the Palestinians were not consulted; it is merely their land.
More surprising in a way was that Blair remained outside the loop from last Sunday onwards when Sharon's people met two members of the National Security Council and a senior American diplomat in Washington's Hay Adams Hotel to thrash out an agreement before Sharon arrived 48 hours later.
Blair gave no hint of bitterness in the RoseGarden press conference on Friday, but considering the risks he has taken to support America since 9/11, it was astonishingly ungracious of Bush to keep him out of these negotiations. The 'Road Map' and the promise of multilateral action in Palestine and the West Bank were, after all, the only real concession that Blair won in exchange for British help in Iraq. Yet before he had even touched down in America, the deal was done. Bush's undertaking to his 'friend' had been chucked away like a motto in Christmas cracker.
I am one of those who believe that Blair should be relieved of his duties because of the failure to find WMD but, even so, I would not wish the humiliation he has suffered on him or any British Prime Minister. He has been one of America's staunchest allies, biting his lip at the serial crassness of US commanders and arguing the American case tirelessly, as he did last weekend in these pages. Yet, despite the enthusiastic tone at the White House, the reality is that he was cast aside as soon as Bush didn't need him.
American foreign policy consists entirely of self-interest, never more so than in an election year when a first-term President is pursuing an extra couple of per cent of Jewish votes in Florida and Ohio. For this, the President attempts to put the world's most serious problem into storage, leaving the destiny of people hanging in the air and the world open-mouthed at the nakedness of his motives.
The Prime Minister has argued that the Sharon plan is, in effect, stage one of the 'Road Map' and that it may contain an opportunity for progress, but the signs are not hopeful for the simple reason that it dismisses Security Council resolution 242 which demands an Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders. Drafted by the British, 242 is the central pillar of the Palestinian case and to have it dismissed by the Americans and Israelis will add to their rage and sense of injustice.
In his Observer article last week about Iraq, the Prime Minister wrote that a 'significant part of Western opinion is sitting back, if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with Schadenfreude at the difficulty we find'. There's a reason for this which he may have appreciated better at the end of last week than he did at the beginning. A vast proportion of intelligent Western opinion is sick of the world's most delicate problems being subsumed to the ambitions of a few American politicians.
We hurried to war last year so that it wouldn't overlap with Bush's election campaign. We are about to hand over to a sovereign authority in Iraq, the nature of which is still unclear, so that he can distance himself from events there during the run-up to 4 November. Now, Bush dispatches the Palestinian problem to the distant rim of the agenda with this shoddy fix in a hotel room.
TonyBlair was wrong to suggest that some wish for failure. The world is too perilous for that; they just pray that the American and British governments understand the reasons for the failures so far. Opponents of the war may have given up worrying about the WMD, mostly because Blair and Bush no longer feel the need to answer for their mistake. But this doesn't allay their fears about the disastrous mishandling of the peace. The mistakes are ongoing and cumulative, chiefly because America is perceived as having a distinct bias against Arabs and Islam. Britain, though more balanced in its attitude, is dragged along in the slipstream and no one inIraq is in the mood to make fine distinctions.
A valuable lesson, which RobertMcNamara has lived long enough to learn and which he expresses with a certain gritty sadness in The Fog of War, is the need to empathise with your foe.
America and Britain have failed to do that at practically every turn. Western troops are not regarded as bearers of the gift of democracy but an invading force that has ripped pride and sovereignty from the Iraqi people. This is not to say that Iraqis don't appreciate the beginnings of a free press and increased civil liberties, but other religious and cultural emotions have come into play. We must recognise them in order to isolate the real troublemakers.
The most worrying trend has been the way so many stories have merged into a single current: Palestine, Iraq, the warnings to US citizens in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden's tape and the 9/11 hearings have all come together to create a sense of general intractability. The clash of civilisations predicted by American neoconservative thinkers seems to be happening before our eyes.
There are solutions to many of these problems, chiefly an increased role for the United Nations, now being wooed by the Prime Minister and Bush. Kofi Annan should use this to his advantage, for the only way to establish peace in Iraq, or Palestine, is with the international community's reinvigorated will.
The UN is the only organisation that can get Britain and America out of the mess they are in. Rather than being polite and diplomatic, the Secretary General should ram that message home, reminding them how America swept aside the reservations of the international community last year.
The UN has suffered greatly from Bush's arrogance. He must now concede that US military might is not everything. Iraq was a mistake of a very large order and that should be entered into the public record so that the American public may consider it on 4 November.
All is not lost. The solutions are there and we can reach for them if only we have the will to push back the American influence and rein in our Prime Minister's ludicrous attempt to strut the world stage.
There were smiles of conviction and staunchness in the RoseGarden on Friday, indicating to some that the special relationship was not dead. But the only foreign leader who has any claim to be America's friend had just left town with the deeds to the West Bank in his back pocket. | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 1:18 am Post subject: Russert Asks, Kerry Avoids |
| Subj: Russert Asks, Kerry Avoids
Date: 4/18/04 4:37:23 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jblankfort@earthlink.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
If anyone still thinks that John Kerry will be a whit better that the Resident on foreign policy, each day seems to bring with it further proof that is a foolish illusion. This man, who is not "a useful idiot" like Bush and is able to string at least several coherent sentences together at a time, has clearly placed himself in the pocket of the pro-Israel lobby. His refusal to give answers to what are straightforward questions by Russert is as inexcusable as Bush's performance on Tuesday night. Moreover, while Bush is trying to get the US out from under what has become a debacle in Iraq and get US troops out of there, Kerry and his supporters are calling for more troops to be sent. Meanwhile, Nader seems to be silent on both issues. (Thanks to Jim Harris for the transcript.)
Jeff
From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4772030/
EXCERPT:
MR. RUSSERT: Israel assassinated Hamas leader Rantisi. Do you support that assassination?
SEN. KERRY: I believe Israel has every right in the world to respond to any act of terror against it. Hamas is a terrorist, brutal organization. It has had years to make up its mind to take part in a peaceful process. They refuse to. Arafat refuses to. And I support Israel's efforts to try to separate itself and to try to be secure. The moment Hamas says, "We've given up violence, we're prepared to negotiate," I am absolutely confident they will find an Israel that is thirsty to have that negotiation.
MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday, President Bush broke with the tradition and policy of six predecessors when he said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush?
SEN. KERRY: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: Completely?
SEN. KERRY: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: You also said in December that you would consider as presidential ambassadors to the Middle East President Clinton, but also former President Carter and Secretary of State Baker. You then met with Jewish leaders and said, "I will not send Carter or Baker." Why?
SEN. KERRY: I think that what I was trying to talk about, Tim, was a kind of potential for
bipartisanship as to how you might be able to approach putting a special envoy in place. The names obviously need to be acceptable to everybody within the community. You've got to do that as a matter of diplomacy. Subsequent to those names being floated, obviously, some people have different views about it.
MR. RUSSERT: Why do you think Carter and Baker are not acceptable?
SEN. KERRY: Well, that's not important. What's important is how to resolve the crisis, how do you move forward. I believe there's a way to move forward, I'm convinced of that. Now, I think what the president did in the last few days is to recognize a reality that even President Clinton came to. If you're going to have a Jewish state, and that is what we are committed to do and that is what Israel is, you cannot have a right of return that's open-ended or something. You just can't do it. It's always been a non-starter. I personally said that at a speech I gave to the Arab community in New York at the World Economic Forum. I've said that. I've also said that it is realistic because we know that at Taba they negotiated the annexation of certain territory. So it's really stating a reality.
What this administration has not done that it needs to do, what we need is a diplomacy that is ongoing and engaged with the Arab community in order to help to create and help emerge the kind of entity that will provide a peaceful resolution to this. Israel has no partner, no one to be able to negotiate with today. I think the United States and this administration could have done a much more effective job of helping that to emerge, but they were completely disengaged. I will not be disengaged. And I will have somebody involved in that at the highest level that has the respect of the community, the trust of Israel, and we will be able to move forward. | | | | foppe37 | | Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 6:19 am Post subject: clash, but not of civilisations |
| << The most worrying trend has been the way so many stories have merged into a single current: Palestine, Iraq, the warnings to US citizens in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden's tape and the 9/11 hearings have all come together to create a sense of general intractability.
The clash of civilisations predicted by American neoconservative thinkers seems to be happening before our eyes. >>
I have three objections to the above quote, 'civilisations', 'seems' and the word 'thinkers'.
That there is a clash is quite clear, EU commissar Patten yesterday night said 'that the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq is wrong, Iraq is far more serious'.
Patten is a competent man, and humorous.
He once stated that Bush had offered Turkey the EU membership several times, he then added that maybe the EU should offer Mexico membership of the United States.
That civilisations are clashing seems nonsensical, in 1948 Nüremberg the fascists were condemned to death mainly because of pre emptive attacks.
Very few people would call the Nazi's a civilisation.
In this line of thinking there also is no USA civilisation, or an Israeli one, just naked power, what is the main ingredient of what is called fascism.
Then there is the word 'thinkers'.
Now of course apes have been taught human language, one ape made even a joke when he was asked to make a banana wet, he threw it outside.
When he was reprimanded, the banana should have been put in bowl with water, the ape pointed outside, it rained.
So the word 'thinkers' can be used in a variety of ways.
But ordinarily 'thinkers' is used for people who use their brains, human brains.
Quite aside from the moral aspects, invading other countries no longer is seen as the thing to do, the wars that these neocons have caused in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the wars that are quite likely to follow, among them the destruction of Israel, and the end of the USA as world power, cannot be described as the results of thinking.
Just crazy criminals concoct schemes like 'liberating' Afghanistan and Iraq. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | foppe37 | | Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2004 6:44 am Post subject: El Quaida needs Bush |
| El Quaida wrote to a London Arab newspaper that they will not attack the USA again before the nevember elections, they want Bush re- elected,they need a judeo-christian extremist fool as president, in order that more 'terrorists' are created.
So USA citizens until the november elections can attend soccer and other games without worries.
No such letter exists about Tony B-liar. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:31 am Post subject: Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All? |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-shatz15apr15,1,3155260.story
April 15, 2004
COMMENTARY
Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All?
Bush's lumping together of dissimilar militant groups is a dangerous mistake.
COMMENTARY
By Adam Shatz
"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar," President Bush argued, with seductive simplicity, in Tuesday's press conference.
"The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad," he continued, "is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on Sept. 11, 2001."
Bush's argument boiled down to this: A terrorist is a terrorist, whether he is a member of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas or of an Iraqi resistance organization fighting American troops — and, whatever their differences, they are all inflamed by the "same ideology of murder." Intended as an expression of "moral clarity," it's likely to convince many Americans. But does it hold up? Are such groups all the same, and are they actually driven by an identical ideology?
Let's start by defining terrorism. It's a notoriously slippery concept: As the cliche goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But the most widely accepted and neutral definition is that it is violence against civilians to achieve political aims.
Do all of Bush's examples pass the test? Certainly the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in Bali and Madrid, do. But what about the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 by Lebanese militants belonging to Islamic Jihad (the precursor to Hezbollah), which Bush also referred to? However appalling, this was directed at a military target in the midst of a civil war. The Marines landed in Beirut as peacekeepers, but they came in the aftermath of Israel's invasion and were perceived by the Shiite community as intervening on the side of Israel and its Christian Falangist allies.
Likewise, however much one deplores the roadside bombings of American soldiers by Iraqi fighters, such acts scarcely qualify as "terrorism." The aim is not to kill American civilians but to target soldiers and thereby drive the American army out of Iraq. Whether you support it or oppose it, it's not terrorism; it's resistance to occupation.
As for the horrifying suicide attacks by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade on buses and in restaurants in Israel, they certainly qualify as terrorism — i.e., violence against civilians to achieve political aims. But it is unfair (and misleading) to say that these attacks are motivated by a diffuse "ideology of murder." In fact, they're motivated by long-simmering nationalist rage against a 37-year-old occupation that shows few signs of abating; despite the similarity in methods, they are distinct from Al Qaeda's attacks on trains and resorts. This does not excuse such attacks, but it does distinguish them.
Unlike Al Qaeda, moreover, Palestinian militants are not at war with the U.S. Hamas' arena of operations is limited, and so are its aims: Its struggle is with Israel, not with the West.
Giandomenico Picco, the former U.N. diplomat who helped secure the release of the Western hostages held by Shiite militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s, believes it is important to draw a careful distinction between "tactical" and "strategic" terrorism. Tactical terror, however murderous, is a means of pursuing concrete territorial goals that — whether we agree with them or not — are at least real goals. Strategic terror, by contrast, is an end in itself.
Many nationalist groups have used tactical terrorism, from Algeria's National Liberation Front to South Africa's African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army to the Irgun and Stern Gang in Palestine during the British mandate period. Once they achieved independence, these groups generally abandoned terrorism, and many former "terrorists" have become statesmen, among them Nelson Mandela (the leader of a group long classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department) and Menachem Begin (who, as the leader of the Irgun militia, presided over the July 22, 1946, bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 civilians).
Since the end of Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon four years ago, Hezbollah has largely followed this pattern. The organization now has nine deputies in the Lebanese parliament, where it has focused its efforts on improving the lives of its Shiite constituents. Although the party continues to exchange fire with Israeli soldiers on the border and to offer rhetorical and logistical support for Palestinian militants, it has not been implicated in an attack on Western civilians in more than a decade. The first Islamic cleric to denounce 9/11 was none other than Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior Shiite cleric who served as Hezbollah's spiritual guide at the time of the 1983 bombings. Like most Shiites, he loathes the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, who in turn revile the Shiites.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, has declared war on the United States and the West, and its terrorism is strategic: not simply a means to an end but an end in itself. Its ideology is fanatical, apocalyptic and expansionist, and its goal — the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of "Crusaders and Zionists" — is a recipe for endless war.
Far from being an expression of moral clarity, Bush's promiscuous definition of terrorism blinds us to the distinctions among groups with very different and often-clashing agendas and threatens to drag us into further unnecessary wars.
To insist upon these distinctions is not to excuse the murder of civilians, which must be condemned, or to endorse the agenda of nationalist insurgencies that use "tactical terror." Rather, it is to acknowledge that terror comes in different forms, and that in order to combat it successfully, we need to know which kind we're confronting.
Adam Shatz is literary editor of The Nation. | | | | foppe37 | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 10:23 am Post subject: Bush and a caliphate |
| Bush just errs all the time, no news.
<< Al Qaeda, by contrast, has declared war on the United States and the West, and its terrorism is strategic: not simply a means to an end but an end in itself.
Its ideology is fanatical, apocalyptic and expansionist, and its goal — the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of "Crusaders and Zionists" — is a recipe for endless war. >>
El Quaida hardly exists, it's just a name for Muslim resistance to the USA's and Israel's oppression and colonialism.
So who knows what El Quaida wants ?
If any ideology is fanatical, expansionist and apocalyptic, it's the USA's ideology to make the whole world like the USA, capitalistic: moneymaking, Hollywood movies, hamburgers, and oversized cars.
This USA ideology exists since the First World War, and is now nearing, I expect, and hope, it's logical end.
As a Texan said in a French tv report on Midland Texas: 'this country is going backwards intellectually and forwards religiously, and Bush fits perfectly in these developments'.
WW III is not endless, the USA clearly is in confusion, even USA citizens begin to understand that the Iraqi's do not see them as welcome liberators.
There are other values than USA values.
I just read a historian who writes that pre Islamic Arab culture was more learned than Islamic culture.
If this is true is very questionable, all pre christian Greek and other old writings came to the west through translations from Arabic in the 11th and later centuries, through Islamic Spain.
But there is an interesting similarity, christians burned the great library at Alexandria, since it contained 'heathen literature'. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
