Charly the ***** wrote:

"Dr. Psycho" wrote:

Nation
The Five Fatal Mistakes of Bush's Mideast Policy
Analysis: The U.S. President may have had noble aims, but his
administration's policies have helped push the region toward
catastrophe
By SCOTT MACLEOD/CAIRO

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006
President Bush travels to Jordan this week amid a consensus among
U.S.
allies in the Middle East that the region is monumentally worse off
now
than it was when he took office six years ago. In Iraq, there seems
little prospect of achieving anything that could be construed as a
U.S.
victory - and as a result, it is unlikely to send the promised tidal
wave of freedom crashing across the Arab world. Instead, Iraq has
effectively disintegrated into a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that
threatens
to spread instability throughout the region.

Elsewhere, Israelis and Palestinians have descended into one of the
most intractable cycles of conflict in their long struggle. In
Lebanon,
the national unity agreement that ended almost two decades of civil
war
in 1990 appears to be unraveling, as sectarian factions are again
edging toward another bloodbath. Meanwhile, Arab autocrats remain
entrenched, Arab democrats are feeling abandoned, and Iran's Islamic
revolution is enjoying a second wind. For all the grand ambition of
President Bush's interventions in the Middle East, a veteran Western
diplomat recently offered TIME the following glum assessment: "The
region is in as serious a mess as I have ever seen it. There is an
unprecedented number of interconnected conflicts and threats."

The fact that Bush is holding talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki not in Baghdad, but in the comparatively tranquil Jordanian
capital of Amman, has not gone unnoticed."One hundred and fifty
thousand U.S. soldiers cannot secure protection for their president,"
mocked a Jordanian columnist, who called the choice of venue "an open
admission of gross failure for Washington and its allies' project in
Iraq."

So, how did things go wrong? The Bush Administration is not entirely
to
blame. The Middle East is a tough neighborhood, and many of its
various
ills - repression, extremism and conflict - have been around for
decades. Bush deserves credit, in fact, for reversing - on paper if
not in practice - years of American policy by promoting democracy in
the Arab world and calling for an independent Palestinian state. But
the Bush Administration made five fatal mistakes that contributed to
the crisis in which it now finds itself.

1. Bush ignored the Palestinians.

Up until the week that Bill Clinton left office in January 2001,
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were still trying to work out an
ambitious end-of-conflict agreement. True, Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat had unleashed an intifadeh, and the Israelis were on the verge
of electing Ariel Sharon - an avowed enemy of the Oslo peace process
- as prime minister, but the two sides were still talking. When Bush
became president, he ended crucial American mediation, repudiated
Arafat and backed Sharon, who proceeded to expand Israeli settlements
in the occupied West Bank. With the conflict becoming bloodier than
ever, Arafat died, and Hamas, the fundamentalist party that adamantly
refuses to even recognize Israel, much less negotiate with it, ousted
the late Palestinian leader's party from power. Besides angering Arab
opinion, the lack of an Arab-Israeli peace process that would also
address Israel's occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights has
encouraged
mischief-making by Damascus, which is suspected of aiding anti-U.S.
insurgents in Iraq and committing political assassinations in
Lebanon.

2. Bush invaded Iraq.

After 9/11, Bush became convinced that Saddam Hussein was seeking
nuclear weapons and represented a mortal threat to the West. He also
came to believe that ousting Saddam would turn Iraq into a democracy
that would become the model for the rest of the Arab world. Saddam
turned out not to have nuclear weapons, and Iraq turned out to be
more
prone to civil war than democracy. It runs the risk of becoming a
failed state from which terrorists run global operations, and/or
breaking into ethnic mini-states that inspire secessionist trouble
throughout the region.

3. Bush misjudged Iran.

Just after Bush became president, Iranians reelected moderate
President
Mohammed Khatami, who had reached out to the U.S. and called for a
"dialogue of civilizations." Bush not only refused to extend the
olive
branch cautiously offered by the Clinton Administration, he declared
Iran part of an "axis of evil." Khatami left office under fire for
the
failure of his conciliatory approach, to be replaced by hard-line
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who proceeded to promote Iran's
nuclear
ambitions and call for Israel to be wiped off the map. Despite Bush's
tough talk against Iran, the Iraq war has dramatically expanded
Iran's
influence in the country. To make matters worse, Iran's Lebanese
ally,
Hizballah, withstood Israel's month-long onslaught last summer and is
poised to topple the U.S.-backed Lebanese government.

4. Bush hurt Israel.

If protecting Israel had been a key goal of the Administration's
policies, it is hard to see how they have helped make the Jewish
State
better off today. Having gotten rid of Arafat, they have instead to
face Hamas. And continuous rocket attacks from Gaza have highlighted
the limits of what Israel can achieve through its plans to
unilaterally
redraw its borders. The confrontation in Lebanon over the summer and
the messy engagement in Gaza also highlight the limits on the
deterrent
capacity of Israel's military advantages. Spreading instability in
the
region is not in Israel's long-term interests; nor is a nuclear Iran.

5. Bush alienated Muslims.

It was an honest misstep, but the problem began when Bush promised to
wage a "crusade" against al-Qaeda after September 11, effectively
equating his war on terrorism with an earlier Christian invasion of
the
Middle East that remains etched in the collective memory of Muslims.
Since then, the Bush Administration's involvement in or perceived
support of military campaigns against Iraqis, Palestinians and
Lebanese
heightened Muslim anger at the U.S. and undermined the political
position of moderate, pro-American Arabs, including old U.S. allies
like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia
- and, of course, King Abdullah II of Jordan, the host of Bush's
Middle East visit this week.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1563750,00.html

But these aren't screw-ups; they're part of a very carefully crafted
Plan,
the end result of which is to enslave the entire population of the
planet.
Does anyone here remember what was happening on 10 SEP 2001? The
economy
was tanking, Bush was being scrutinized by the media over the
disasterous
election of 2000 and the one vote victory (5 to 4) he achieved at the
hands
of the Supremes. Then wham, 9/11 and everything is turned upside down
in
the space of an hour. That very afternoon, the little twerp runs his
mouth
and starts the war with his flippant 'crusade' comment on live
international TV. In his state of the onion speech the next January, he
compounds the error by declaring that he's going to 'make peace in the
Middle East', He then procedes to shred the Constitution with an
unending
list of new laws designed to increase his personal power at the expense
of
everyone else. (we have yet to fire a single shot, the actual war is
still
in the planning stage) Now, five years later, we have the NSA
listening in
on everyone's phone calls, we have an Attorney General who thinks
torture
is an acceptable interrogation technique, we have a suspension of
habeous
corpus, where anyone can be held indefinitely without charge on
'suspicion
of being an "Enemy Combatant" including US citizens if W takes a
dislikin'
to you, secret trials where hearsay is admissable as evidence,
transportation in secret to foreign countries where torture is standard
operating procedure... the list just goes on and on. If this guy isn't
the
Antichrist, he's making a damn good audition for the position. Waiting
in
the wings is the Real ID Act, due to fire up in the spring of 2008.
This
perfidious bit of legislation actually satisfies all three listed
criteria
for the Mark of the Beast; mandated by the State, tied to the hands and
face, enables commerce. But that doesn't seem to register with most of
the
population, who have been thoroughly scared shitless by the constant
drumbeat of "terror in the homeland", even though no other attack has
followed the disaster of 9/11. We'll see just what happens to those
persons
who for whatever reason decide to resist compliance with the Act soon
enough, but of course by then it will be too late to mount an effective
counter campaign.

Charly

When Ahmadinejad was elected by a narrow margin last year -- and he
wasn't expected to win by most pundits -- he may have had his hardline
anti-Western, anti-Israel attitude gain more favor among voters by
Bush's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, next door. It's entirely
plausible that America's aggression, it's fervent militarism, has
helped give "birth" to Ahmadinejad...the anti-christ poster child of
the Axis Of Evil. LOL!
Whether the various events in that region signal part of a conspiracy,
or plan, or simply gross mistakes (frosted by cover-ups) by a bungling
bunch of right-wing idealists, appears to be an exercise in academic
conjecture to me at this point. One can make an interesting case for
authoritarian globalism, or domestic fascism, as a well-developed,
expertly executed long-range secret operation. I've certainly
entertained the theories and try to keep an open mind on this angle. In
any case, I do know where we now sit, and it's near the bottom of Hell.
If the world can slip by a much larger conflict, and terrible economic
dislocations, and resultant increased limitations on our personal
liberties in the coming years it will actually make me believe in
divine miracles.
Dr. Psycho