Cossack wrote:

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Lest we forget, All those people you listed are just wannabe Republicans. Anyway, they did not believe what they said, they lied to get votes. Those wannabe Republicans lied and people died.

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This is a very astute observation. It's just plain danged silly to say that the list of characters on LWF's list represents an alternative to Bush and company. At best, they're a sort of Bush Lite, coroporate-funded hacks of a slightly different body and flavor. Sorry about an ad hominem vitriol; one reason I've curtailed my activism is that I found myself more and more incapable of civility.

OTP,

Thanks for a civil and thoughtful response.  I don't have time to reply right now, and may not have time until tonight.  However, I appreciate the time and thought you put into this most recent post.

off the plantation wrote:

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one reason I've curtailed my activism is that I found myself more and more incapable of civility.

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Cossack wrote:

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off the plantation, What I'm saying is that the USA's uncritical support for Israeli governments that are prone to actions judged illegal and immoral by much of the world has done nothing but help the cause of al-Qaeda.

Your statement is naive and in error. The judgment of the rest of the world is not relevant, that most of the rest of the world is anti Israel is all the more reason to back the Israelis. ...

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Sorry i hit the submit button too fast.

The anti-Semitic sentiment that prevailed before WWII appears to be re ignited across Europe and I see it creeping into the thinking of some on this Board.

My point was to be that the last part of your sentence is a subtle version of argumentum ad hominum. Your first phrase is your real subject. Your last phrase is a rhetorical tactic to undermine arguments of those who disagree with you by calling their motivations into questions. It also is a way of implying that, since thos epersons have a particular point of view, thet are both slanting the argument and are not open to arguments unlike their own. In which case, why have disussions at all?

Probably best to assume that most everyone has some motivation to be interested in the discussion . . .  and therefore not too diffcicult to assume that people tend to shade to one side or the other.

That, however, is so fundamenta as to not need pointing out . . . . stick to the validity of the arguments themselves rather than the political sympathies of those who make them.

TEHRAN, Iran - The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."

Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

On Friday, he repeated his previous line on the Holocaust, saying: "If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and have its land occupied?" . . . "The existence of this (Israeli) regime is a permanent threat" to the Middle East, he added. "Its existence has harmed the dignity of Islamic nations."

. . . On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium using a battery of 164 centrifuges, a significant step toward the large-scale production of enriched uranium required for either fueling nuclear reactors or making nuclear weapons.

The United States, France and Israel accuse Iran of using a civilian nuclear program to secretly build a weapon. Iran denies this, saying its program is confined to generating electricity.

The U.N. Security Council has given Iran until April 28 to cease enrichment. But Iran has rejected the demand.

The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, was quoted Wednesday as saying Iran could develop a nuclear bomb "within three years, by the end of the decade."

Israel has nukes. Everybody knows this right? Ahmadenijad (SP?), the Iranian leader knows this. One of the reasons that Iraq and Iran have long coveted nukes is precisely because Israel has had them since the early 1970's.

And once again, to clarify, I am in no way in support of disarming or in any other way "not supporting" Israel. That's pure projection on the part of Cossack. His view, which is pretty common, reflects an understandable desire to see the frighteningly complex world in which we live in comfortingly simple terms of good vs. evil, black and white, "us" vs. "them." Fact is, America has done evil in the world, and it has done good too. The refusal of many Americans to understand this ambiguity, even when it's staring them right in the face, is a symptom of our national immaturity. I say once again, get over it!

Coversely, what I am in favor of is the USA's being equally assiduous in support of both Israel and the cause of Palestinian statehood.

All peoples of the world have an inherent right to exist; none of the world's peoples has the right to deny that right to exist to another people. The Nazis tried to deny the right of existence to the Jews. What has happened since, however, is that, on a lesser scale,Israeli leaders have repeatedly denied the right to existence of the Palestinians. The USA, by not premising Israeli aid and assistance on Israel's adopting a more just course with the Palestinians has worsened and perpetuated the historical religious, ethnic and cultural tensions in the Palestine and contributed to the rise of Islamist terrorism worldwide.

The only reason folks can't see this is . . . what? You tell me: why do Islamists such as OBL and the Iranian president hate the USA so much?

off the plantation wrote:

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And once again, to clarify, I am in no way in support of disarming or in any other way "not supporting" Israel.

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Here are some responses to some of OTP's earlier points (his points in bold, my responses not in bold).  I will try to be brief but will probably fail.

First, clearly, one does not wage a conventional war in/against an Islamic, Arab nation, Iraq, that was a bystander--according to the Congressional 9/11 Commission--in the 9-11 attacks. The Iraq occupation has been a PR success for radical Islamists, and has given them a chance to try out a command structure and tactics--the IED, coming to a neighborhood near you!--and recruit like never before. The US must withdraw immediately. Immediately. Anything but international humanitarian aid in Iraq will strengthen the appeal and extend the reach of al-Qaeda.

Despite claims to the contrary, the administration never tried to justify the war by claiming Iraq was involved in 9/11.  It did try to justify the war by claiming that Iraq was rapidly developing the potential to support future terrorism using WMDs, and all the world's intelligence agencies concurred.  So did most top Democrats.

If the US withdrew immediately, there would be a bloodbath.  Would you like that on your conscience?  There is at present a half-way realistic hope that Iraq can be turned into a half-way democratic nation and thus help transform the region.  Several elections have already taken place; most of the country is relatively peaceful; most of the citizens are now much freer than they were under Saddam.  It's precisely the prospect of relative democracy in the middle east that horrifies Al Qaeda, which would rather impose Islamic law there and everywhere.

Second, any rational appraisal of the temper of the Arab street--the spawning ground of Islamist terrorism--must take into account the history of US support for Israel. Consistently, US policy has been to offer Tel Aviv financial and military support w/no strings attached, despite how the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and their brutal treatment of the Palestinians, have given Israeli governments the dubious distinction of having had more UN Resolutions levelled against them than even Saddam Hussein. The US, if it wants peace it our lifetimes, must work with Arab, Asian and European diplomats and the UN, to broker a legitimate, just, equitable solution in the Palestine. Such will manifestly not be the phony "Roadmap to Peace" patched together in Oslo. This was little more than an Israel friendly "Balkanizing" of Arab Palestine into a patchwork of what American Vietnam-planners called "strategic hamlets": small, isolated enclaves of non-Israelis cut off from each other by walls, guns and Israeli checkpoints and deprived of their dignity, arable land and water rights. The brokering of a genuine solution in the Palestine will be the defining act of the entire generation that does it and a good portion of the puzzle of world peace will fall into place when that happens. One of those pieces of the puzzle will be al-Qaeda.

Therefore, the USA needs to convene nothing less than a 21st century equivalent of the Congress of Vienna to ajudicate the future of Israel and Palestine. As Napoleon changed the face of Europe, so Islamist terrorism has made the condition of Palestine the concern of the whole world. Same with Iraq. It will take the whole world to solve it. It's time for the USA to shrug off its protracted adolescence, come of age, and join the family of nations at last. Please, no more rhetoric of lost innocence . . .

I don't place much stock in UN resolutions.  Let's not forget that most of those resolutions were conceived, supported, and/or defended by dictatorships that could not care less about human rights, particularly in their home countries.  Many of the resolutions were fostered by the Soviets before the Soviet tyranny collapsed; many of the resolutions are now supported by tin-horn dictators all over the map (including Colonel Qaddafi, when he is not fixing his mascara).

This is also why I don't take "world opinion" as seriously as you do.  Whose opinion, precisely, are you referring to?  The opinions of people or of their dictatorial governments?  How can I know, for instance, what the average Cuban thinks when Castro won't allow average Cubans to vote or even dissent? 

If you are referring to the opinions of people in the Western European democracies, you are on stronger ground, although they often have their own peculiar reasons for their policies.  (E.g., the French are terrified of their own Islamic minority, when they are not just plain terrified in general.)

I don't have as much confidence as you in the process of international negotiations or in the track record of international bodies (such as the League of Nations or the United Nations).

What evidence can you produce that Arab leaders really do want a negotiated settlement with Israel?  What evidence can you produce that Arab leaders and/or peoples really are willing to tolerate a non-Islamic state in their midst, even one as tiny as Israel? 

Al Qaeda wants to reestablish the Caliphate throughout the middle east and also wants to impose sharia on the rest of the world.  It does not want peaceful cooexistence with the non-Islamic peoples; it wants the entire world to be Islamic.  What evidence can you present that this is not the case?

Third, and here it's necessary to become a bit more abstract, one must realize that al-Qaeda and its clones are not state actors any more than the "Contras"--terrorists illegally funded by the Reagan regime in Nicaragua in the 1980's--were American soldiers, or the IRA in Ulster were agents of the Irish Republic. It really doesn't make sense to identify "rogue states" for "regime change" when the taproot of world terror is not pariah states. Rather terror must be understood a growing out of the global social order that has emerged since WWII. Al-Qaeda is a perfect example of this relation, this context. Rather than state actors, what you have in al-Qaeda is a species of post modern social bandits: criminals against an established order who have the support of the populace because that populace perceives the established order to be unjust and inequitable. Think Robin Hood in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; Che and Castro in Batista's kleptocractic Cuba; the James-Younger Gang in Reconstruction Arkansas and Missouri; Bonnie and Clyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd in the Great Depression Dust Bowl region; each of these was the product of a pathological, local, social order. Islamic fundementalist terrorism, however, is the end product of a global social order that has systematically alienated, disenfranchised and ignored, and sometimes abused, too much of the world population. Kids, the violence of al-Qaeda is the violence of the globe's oppressed peoples striking at the perceived centers of their oppression. Even if the actual mujahaddein are not the wretched of the earth themselves, although they often are, the jihad that destroyed the Twin Towers could not exist if it were not for the widespread perception of American and European hostility towards the Isalmic, and the developing, world.  World Trade (as in "World Trade Center"), in other words, looks anything but fair when seen from the Arab street and other margins of global social and economic order.

The nations that have embraced American economic values (e.g., South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, increasingly, even communist China [!]) are prospering or beginning to prosper; the nations that cling to unrealistic economic models are languishing in the same economic morass that has been their fate for thousands of years - long before the "American empire."  I'm sure you've seen the famous satellite photos of North and South Korea at night - one almost pitch-black, the other illuminated with the electric lights that signify prosperity.  What is your alternative to free trade?  Socialism?  We tried that in the twentieth century, and it never seemed to work, and millions of people lost their lives thanks to the experiment.

Thus, rooting out social bandits such as al-Qaeda is a matter of enlisting the support of ever more and more of the disaffected populace that currently supports them. A viable anti-terrorism campaign, however, also has another, not unrelated component: the earnest cooperation of the police and intelligence agencies of the entire world, both developed and developing nations, North and South. And herein lies the key to my policing strategy: the police and intelligence agencies of most countries, even developed ones, tend to operate in ways that are guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of the Arab street to the terrorists. In some states, the flavor of secret police thuggery permeates the entire body politic, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for instance.

Police state thuggery is typical in much of the world, including in much of the world whose opinions you seek to influence (and whose official government opinions you seem to take seriously).  Part of the reason that the governments of thug Arab nations focus so much of their vitriol on Israel is that the Israelis provide a convenient distraction from the failures of the Arab governments themselves.  I am not uncritical of US policy in the mid-east, but you'll have to convince me that there are vast numbers of Arabs who are really willing to tolerate the existence of Israel, which is a tiny speck of a country.  If the Arabs spent a tenth of their time trying to evolve into modern societies as they focus on Israel, everyone would be much better off.  Heck, they might even evolve into economies capable of building armies that could actually defeat Israel's.)

Thus, the USA must, first, launch diplomatic and economic initiatives that compel brute authoritarian states such as Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to adopt genuine political reforms aimed at bringing the police power under the control of a genuinely democratic civilian authority. Iran would fall into the category of states needing these reforms too, as would Belarus, as would  . . .sorry y'all . . .  Israel and the USA.

Democracy in many middle eastern nations is, I fear, likely to lead to the kind of results we've seen in Palestine: the election of Islamic fanatics who will not even acknowledge the right of Israel to exist.  If democracy led to other results, then you would have Islamic fanatics bombing their own countries, attempting to overthrow democratic results, and seeking to impose the wonderful world of sharia.   

Much of the rest of the world currently feels

Again, how do we know what much of the rest of the world feels about anything, when most of the rest of the world is enslaved?  Ironically, when people get to vote in the most meaningful way possible - through emigration - they tend to head straight for the center of capitalist iniquity, the US.

as if American interests and their interests are mutually exclusive, and this condition brings us to the last component of a viable campaign against terror: the promotion of economic equity and social justice. 

How, exactly?  Through socialism?  Again: we already tried that.  It doesn't work; it never worked; it can't work.  That's precisely why China has made more rapid strides in the past ten years than it EVER made under Mao, and as soon as old Fidel kicks off and his regime collapses, Cuba will have a chance at real prosperity and progress.

To a pronounced extent, it is true that the interests of American-style, and American-led, transnational capitalism are opposed to those of the global Joe and Jane Sixpack.

Would you rather live in South Korea or North Korea? 

Would you rather live in Taiwan or Iran?

This becomes especially apparent when one considers the growing trend of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a genuinely transnational global elite, a minority who have little interest in the fellahin back home.

Apparently wealth is much more widely shared today in China than when Mao was in charge.  Back then, EVERYONE was poor (except Mao and his cronies).

Question: what were all those rich-as-Croesus relatives of OBL doing in the USA on 9-11? Answer: shopping. Back in Saudi, however, the withholding of their wealth and cultural capital from the service of the popular interest creates a spawning ground for al-Qaeda: 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. They were in the USA on 9/11 too, lest we forget. This is no coincidence.

The Saudi people are relatively wealthy by world standards.  They live in a kind of welfare state supported by oil revenues.  What really drives Osama nuts is not that there are poor Saudis but things such as the following: (1) non-Muslims have a tiny little state in the mid-east; (2) the rest of the world fails to acknowledge the obvious supremacy of Allah; (3) people who disagree with each other can actually, in some places, have discussions like the one you and I are having without someone losing a head.

To conclude, American wealth and prestige, what little of the latter left unsquandered after 61 years of American bullying and unilateralism, must be expended in the cause of a more just and equitable distribution of wealth, power and influence. Every step taken in this direction robs al-Qaeda of the popular support it requires. Every step taken in this direction makes possible the sort of smart, low trauma, international police and intelligence cooperation that will identify and bring to justice conspirators against world peace, such as al-Qaeda . . . and others. I know this sounds scary--shades of a New World Order and all that--but the fact is that such a unification of world police power is already being perfected. It's just that it's being perfected in what one might call a dystopian mode; the world is becoming an authoritarian police state run for the benefit and protection of a global economic elite, rather than the sort of cooperative commonwealth needed to ensure world peace and social justice.

Okay, well at least you concede that before 1945 we did a few good things (I assume this includes saving French butts from the Germans twice).  I would argue that in the intervening 61 years we have done a few other good things, such as: (1) rebuilding the economies of the enemies we decimated in the second world war; (2) protecting their freedom and the freedom of the western Europeans (thanks for the gratitude, Francois!); (3) liberating eastern Europe from communism; (4) preventing Castro and his buddies from imposing regimes like his elsewhere in this hemisphere; (5) resisting the trend towards socialism that led nowhere but down; (6) providing a model for economic prosperity for those countries wise enough to follow it; etc., etc. etc. 

Your ideal of a "ccoperative commonwealth" that will "ensure world peace and social justice" is unlikely ever to come to pass (it is incredibly utopian), but, if it ever DOES come to pass, it will be the result of more and more countries throwing off tyrants and becoming democratic (as has happened, for instance, in eastern Europe).  The Eastern Europeans, by the way, would be very skeptical of many of your arguments, since they know what it's like to live under tyrannical governments and since (unlike most of "the world") they are now free to express themselves. 

To put it another way, LWF, al-Qaeda is a symptom, not the disease. As long as an inequitable global economic and social order persists, al-Qaeda will persist too. Worse it will proliferate and grow, not despite American military and economic power, but because of it. 

Osama doesn't care about an inequitable social order, but it really ticks him off that you don't acknowledge Allah.  American military and economic power is the best thing standing between you and the New Caliphate. 

In the name of Allah, the most great, the most merciful, I hereby conclude my response.  (Disagree and we slit your throat.)