| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"The Revvv" |
| Date: |
15 Dec 2006 10:37:06 PM |
| Object: |
Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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.
|
|
| User: "Al Nakba" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
15 Dec 2006 11:49:40 PM |
|
|
Quite so..
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
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=7Gn9
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.
|
|
|
| User: "The Revvv" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 12:05:17 AM |
|
|
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
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.
|
|
|
| User: "Al Nakba" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 12:07:50 AM |
|
|
Because it's a Borg Cube..
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
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=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "The Revvv" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 01:25:12 AM |
|
|
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
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=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "Al Nakba" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 11:16:47 AM |
|
|
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
1RFL0zWUG3c1kEjBAUpQcNM=
=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "The Revvv" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 11:46:34 AM |
|
|
On 16 Dec 2006 09:16:47 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
Collective farting five times a day, announced by the muezzin!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
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=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "Al Nakba" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 11:49:18 AM |
|
|
Matches should be taken from him lest he light up his fatwas..
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:16:47 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
Collective farting five times a day, announced by the muezzin!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
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=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "The Revvv" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 12:57:21 PM |
|
|
On 16 Dec 2006 09:49:18 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Matches should be taken from him lest he light up his fatwas..
The Star of Bethlehem was one such collective fart which someone lit!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:16:47 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
Collective farting five times a day, announced by the muezzin!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Search Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/htdig/search.html
List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
================================================================
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFFguDtiz2i76ou9wQRAugFAJ94su0D9pek3ZdV8eGEmMhPWuyAOgCgmm4V
1RFL0zWUG3c1kEjBAUpQcNM=
=7Gn9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
.
|
|
|
| User: "Al Nakba" |
|
| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 01:01:30 PM |
|
|
Is that your official sermon?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:49:18 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Matches should be taken from him lest he light up his fatwas..
The Star of Bethlehem was one such collective fart which someone lit!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:16:47 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
Collective farting five times a day, announced by the muezzin!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at
a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the
Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project,
memorably exclaimed: "Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?" But
the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death,
maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese,
Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader
alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we
walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we
are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It's important to
stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion
of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were
initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny
of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done
properly. It wasn't. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the
most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet
was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of
the world's democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had
been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least
have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and
abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than
half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still
holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier
in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole
country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a
legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences,
without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam
Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had
in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the
intervention might have been justified; as he didn't, it wasn't. Then,
through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors
in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state
into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean
liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis -
those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than
they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in
Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to
their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace.
If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission's advice, US
troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi
forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by
"Vietnamisation"; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile,
Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the
end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves -
or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years
ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial
democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil
prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of
democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more
than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren
in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is
correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have
weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran's
dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran's
President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state
of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East
safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the
Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came
close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards.
Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits
accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy
in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to
elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the "cedar revolution" in
Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by
its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action
this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to
support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country's western-backed
velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution,
welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase
for the United States' support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush
second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and
Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted
policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to
show is Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few
tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here's the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse
and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins
of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George
Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to
be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention
enthusiastically continuing Washington's long-running Faustian pact with
petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I'm told that Condoleezza Rice,
no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in
the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against
reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is
by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is
one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of
the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we
Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But
Bush must take the lion's share of the blame. There are few examples in
recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr
President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
*
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| User: "The Revvv" |
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| Title: Re: Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East |
16 Dec 2006 09:35:44 PM |
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On 16 Dec 2006 11:01:30 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Is that your official sermon?
It will be on Channukah Day!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:49:18 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Matches should be taken from him lest he light up his fatwas..
The Star of Bethlehem was one such collective fart which someone lit!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 16 Dec 2006 09:16:47 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
exactamundo. george sneaks in for the requisite mass ***** liftings. he
savours the aroma!
Collective farting five times a day, announced by the muezzin!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 22:07:50 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Because it's a Borg Cube..
A Borg Q'ube?
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 21:49:40 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
Quite so..
What I want to know is why the K'ab'aa isn't the Q'ab'aa!
The Re"vvv wrote:
On 15 Dec 2006 09:57:13 -0800, "Al Nakba"
<williamhubbard@bluebottle.com> wrote:
The Islamic world has long been a catastrophe..
The word comes from the Arabic "qatastrophe".
NY.Transfer.N...@blythe.org wrote:
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Bush Has Created a Catastrophe in Middle East
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
The Guaradian via truthout - Dec 14, 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121406C.shtml
Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
By Timothy Garton Ash
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made
the situation worse than it was before.
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration's policy
towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in
a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so
little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every
vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five
years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have t | | | | | | | | | | |
