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whenhiphopdrovethebigcars said:
I´m sure Cheney and his friends are happy that the oil price is expected to go over $80/ barrel.
Not as much as Putin.
whenhiphopdrovethebigcars said:
I´m sure Cheney and his friends are happy that the oil price is expected to go over $80/ barrel.
STING2 said:
There is a huge difference between what Palestinian terrorist do and what the Israely Defense Force does. The IDF attempts to target terrorist engaged or supporting acts of terrorism. The Palestinian terrorist often do not target the IDF, they target innocent civilians. The Bus the Israely's hit was a mistake. The Bus a Palestinian terrorist hit was the target. That is the key difference.
Its shocking to see so many Europeans refuse to support Israel to the degree that the United States does considering what Europeans did to Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Israel is a small state surrounded by enemies that have fought several wars to wipe the country from the map. No European country in Israel's situation would stand for what Israel has to put up with. Yet, their policies toward Israel are borderline hostile. Israel understands the cost of not insuring its security, to many Europeans have forgotten the cost of what it means to fail to insure ones security.
Danospano said:When you move into a neighborhood, and all the other residents told you before hand that they didn't want you there, how can you respond?
If you said, get support from the most powerful nation in the world (The U.S.), and screw everyone else's opinions, you are correct.
From what I've read, yes...the Jewish race had settled this area over 2,500 years ago. So what? They were gone for practically the entire following 2,000 years, and thought they could just walk back in?
This conflict will not end until millions are dead, everything they're fighting for is in atomic rumble, and hell freezes over.
I'm glad I'm not living there. Damn.
yolland said:When you get run out of your old neighborhood, where else are you supposed to go?
The bulk of the Jews who emigrated to Palestine/Israel after the Holocaust (as STING mentioned, there were certainly Jews already there, but obviously not nearly as many) were Central and East European Jews who could not be safely repatriated (most Western European survivors actually returned to their home countries). The Allies could have settled these survivors in their own lands, by force if necessary (as often has to be done in refugee crises, and they certainly had the power to do so), but they did not want to. This has notoriously become one of Ahmadinajad's favorite whipping posts.
Of course this has nothing to do with the justifiability of the current conflict one way or the other. But you make it sound as if those Jews just blithely decided to up and move to Palestine. The majority of Jews were not supporters of Zionism at all before the Holocaust.
Rono said:
What Europeans did to the Jews ? Now we are al Nazi`s ? I thought the states was the first country that refused jew refugies from nazi germany,....
BTW, knowing that you will killing innocent people while you bomb is ( for me ) the same as putting people into gaschambers. You know that they a gonna die and i don`t wanna accept that. I guess palestines are second range people because i see not much anger when they get killed ect,..just like your beloved jews in the 30 and 40,...
Irvine511 said:Joe Klein has an interesting take on things:
[q]Here's my conspiracy theory: It starts with the fact that no one really does know who runs Iran. There are all sorts of competing institutions—governmental and religious and bazaari. There is a secular President, mouthy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a supreme leader, the Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. There is a constitutional tension between those two offices, a tension that may have been heightened in the past year by Ahmadinejad's close relationship with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Corps is a strange institution. It is an extremist religious militia that exists outside the Iranian state apparatus. It is funded by semiprivate charitable institutions, called bonyads, that manage the Shah's confiscated assets, which are enormous. The bonyads aren't part of the government, either. They—and the Revolutionary Guards—are the patrons of Iran's external terrorist organization, Hizballah. In fact, there are Iranian Revolutionary Guard trainers currently stationed in Lebanon. Complicated enough for you? I haven't even begun to conspire yet.
So let's speculate that there's a difference of opinion between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei about how to proceed on nuclear negotiations with the West. Let's say Ahmadinejad doesn't want to negotiate. Let's say he wants to send a message to the West, to the Israelis and also to Khamenei: I'm not a powerless figurehead like my predecessor, Mohammed Khatami. My friends in the Revolutionary Guards give me veto power over any deal. It would not be difficult for Ahmadinejad to send the message, via the Guards, to both Hizballah and the military wing of Hamas, which is based in Damascus and funded in part by Iran: Let's rile up the Israelis and start a crisis. Let's change the subject from the Iranian nuclear negotiations. At the very least, let's lay down an opening marker in the negotiations: If you mess with Iran, we have a multitude of ways to mess with you. Just a theory, of course. "We really don't have any real idea about what goes on inside that government," a senior U.S. diplomat told me recently. But it's not implausible, either. "My sense was that Khamenei didn't want to start trouble anywhere else in the world because it might hurt the nuclear negotiations," says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, author of a recent book about Iran. "But I don't think Hizballah would have crossed the border into Israel without approval from a much higher—Iranian—authority, either."
If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue—and the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran's oily economy. But it is also clear now that a major consequence of George W. Bush's disastrous foreign policy has been an emboldened Iran. The U.S. "has been Iran's very best friend," a diplomat from a predominantly Sunni nation told me recently. "You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq."
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1214918,00.html
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among so many foregn policy failures, perhaps one of the biggest -- in light of recent events -- was Bush's disinterest in the need to broker a real Middle East settlement. it takes time and patience to speak to Yasser Arafat and then assert that Israel will have to make certain concessions in order to move the process along. further, we see that the Bush Administrations panacea for all of the ills of the world, everywhere, ever, in history -- DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS! -- don't always make for good policy or good governance, as see in the election of Hamass from the Palestinian elections last January.
while it's clear that engagement in the region is the best thing for it, the presence of 130,000 troops in Iraq has made it more difficult for us to be as fully engaged in the peace process as we (quite obviously) need to be. we are overstretched in terms of troops and our relationships with governments and populations in the Middle East have never been worse. there have been so many unintended consequences of the Iraq disaster -- which even Colin Powell now describes as a Civil War! -- and just one of which is that Iran is able to be vastly more helpful to Hizbollah in a way that it wasn't able to do before.
what we might be seeing is a nascent regional war between the Sunni and the Shi'a, which has teen totally triggered by Iraq and augmented by an increasingly belligerant Iran. the new closeness between the Iraqi Sunnis and the U.S. (and by assocation and assumption, Israel) might do much to increase Shiite radicalism and pit one against the other, the Shia might be the new infidel.
anitram said:STING why do you continually insist on referring to "Europeans" when criticizing them for various responses during world crises?
I'm sorry but Europe is made up of dozens of nations, different people following different religions and cultural customs.
You tell me what a peasant in Kosovo or Bulgaria could have done to "prevent" the various infractions you have mentioned, in the 1930s?
Eastern Europe, apart from Russia, had little to no organization or infrastructure at that time, they were poor, sometimes starving, under colonial occupation from various western European nations (Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary come to mind) and so on. Why lump all of them in together?
among so many foregn policy failures, perhaps one of the biggest -- in light of recent events -- was Bush's disinterest in the need to broker a real Middle East settlement.
anitram said:STING why do you continually insist on referring to "Europeans" when criticizing them for various responses during world crises?
I'm sorry but Europe is made up of dozens of nations, different people following different religions and cultural customs.
You tell me what a peasant in Kosovo or Bulgaria could have done to "prevent" the various infractions you have mentioned, in the 1930s?
Eastern Europe, apart from Russia, had little to no organization or infrastructure at that time, they were poor, sometimes starving, under colonial occupation from various western European nations (Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary come to mind) and so on. Why lump all of them in together?
Irvine511 said:setting aside the massive US foreign policy failure in Iraq that even Colin Powell describes as a Civil War and that numerous republicans such as Chuck Hegel have compared to a Vietnam-like quagmire and the fact that Iraq is ensconced in a low-level civil war filled with sectarian strife and ethnic cleansing that the current, tenuous Iraqi government and their 50,000 troops deployed to Baghdad alone are powerless to stop all due to the reckless, unilateral invasion combined with the hubris of the Bush regime, it appears as if the U.S. Failure in Iraq is causing a resuffling in the region that even the far right wing editorial pages of the WSJ are noticing:
[q]
Critics of the Bush Administration will surely find a way to blame it for the current crisis, on the theory that this is what happens when you push for change in the Middle East. But the real problem is the growing perception among Arab regimes and terrorist frontmen that the U.S. is so bogged down in Iraq, and so suddenly deferential to the wishes of the “international community,” that it has lost its appetite for serious reform. This has created openings for the kind of terror assaults on American allies we are now witnessing.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008658
[/q]
it's very interesting how the position that the WSJ editors take today is one that “critics” have been arguing for some time. it's also readily apparent that being "bogged down" has nothing to do with troops and everything to do with the ability to effectively deploy those troops so that they can be effective (goodness, if it were numbers alone, China would be the world's dominant military power) and so long as the United States is bogged down in Iraq and refuses to admit the thousands of mistakes it has made, it will not have the moral, political, and military power to deal effectively with the threats it faces. it is quite correct to understand the fact that muslim nations in the middle east believe they have an opportunity to make gains in their respective conflicts, since the US is bogged-down in an ethnic conflict in Iraq that even Colin Powell describes as a Civil War.
silja said:
Not to mention a peasant from Norway, a carpenter from Lichtenstein, or a registered accountant from Ireland. The idea of Europe acting in unison was completely unthinkable 60 years ago and the response to the rise of Nazi-Germany was predictably not coordinated in the least. STING2, lay the blame where it belongs rather than tossing out ‘European’ as the root to all evil.
STING2 said:
Multiple countries participated in the invasion of Iraq which was approved by UN Security Council Resolution 1441 after which UN Security Council REsolution 1483 approved the occupation. There was nothing unilateral about the invasion and here are the countries that are currently on the ground in Iraq with troops:
1 United Kingdom
2 South Korea
3 Italy
4 Poland
5 Ukraine
6 Georgia
7 Romania
8 Japan
9 Australia
10 Denmark
11 Bulgaria
12 El Salvador
13 Azerbaijan
14 Latvia
15 Mongolia
16 Lithuania
17 Albania
18 Slovakia
19 Czech Republic
20 Armenia
21 Bosnia & Herzegovina
22 Macedonia
23 Estonia
24 Kazakhstan
25 Norway
26 Netherlands
How many coalitions with troops on the ground in a single country can you name that had as many countries involved as the current one in Iraq does?
Irvine511 said:
it sounds nice until you look at how many troops are actually there (4 from the Netherlands, for example).
the only accurate comparison would be 1991, and these are the fact there:
overthrowing Hussein and installing a democratic government that is now ensconced in a low-level sectarian conflict that even Colin Powell describes as a Civil War was always going to be more difficult than simply removing Saddam from Kuwait. why would we actually decrease the number of coalition partners and why are there no Muslim or Arab troops involved in the occupation of an Arab country?
Irvine511 said:[q]“I…y’know…I think I would answer that by telling you I don’t think we’re losing.” ~ Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/07/17/i-dont-think-were-losing/
[/q]
i'm glad you're far more confident than the Army Chief of Staff.
STING2 said:I don't find those countries attempts, if there were any, to prevent the abuse of their Jewish populations before the 1930s to have been satisfactory.
STING2 said:
I'm happy you continue to read so much into a single statement taken out of its context. I look forward to the next comment claiming that x city has collapsed. Cato institute should be renamed the institute of isolationism.
STING2 said:Do you any sources besides a post on a Huffington board that actually qoute Colin Powell as saying that Iraq is in a full scale Civil War?
The reason I posted the countries was to show that this operation is far from being a unilateral one as you so often claim.
Saddam had over 1 million troops back in 1991 as well as 6,000 main battle tanks, 6,000 armored vehicles, 5,000 artillery pieces, and over 800 combat aircraft. The size of Saddam's forces at the time required a large force to insure it was defeated as quickly as possible. Whats more, the comparison between numbers of troops in the total force between 1991 and 2003 is inaccurate because greater numbers of support personal were required back in 1991 do to differences in the technology and structure of the forces back then. Todays forces are able to operate with smaller man power totals in their logistical and support area's do to changes in technology and the structure of those area's of the force.
In terms of actual numbers of combat brigades, the 1991 force is only about twice the size of the current force in Iraq. The nature of the threat is very different from fighting a large military force like what Saddam had. Mass numbers of troops in any particular area does not in of itself kill an insurgency. Defeating any insurgency involves many other non-military approaches and takes a considerable amount of time.
The United States never decreased or increased the number of coalition partners for each operation. Those who wanted to actively participate volunteered. If you include the number of countries participating in operation Iraqi freedom at its peak, its actually larger in terms of numbers of countries than the 1991 Gulf War coalition was.
In any event, the non-US military element is FAR MORE ACTIVE in the conflict in Iraq than the non-US element was in the 1991 Gulf War despite the fact that the non-US element was slightly larger as a percentage of the total force in 1991.
The bulk of non-US troops during the 1991 Gulf War were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria. These forces did very little at all in the conflict. They did not enter Iraq at all and went into Kuwait a few miles after the US Marine Corp had already cleared Iraqi defense positions. The Syrian division that was deployed actually had so many of its tanks and other armored personal carries break down that it had to stop after 8 kilometers, it saw no fighting either. Some Saudi forces saw fighting at Kafji before the ground offensive, but that was it. The Kuwaiti force led the way into Kuwait City after it was insured the the Iraqi military had completely withdrawn from the city. The French troops that were deployed did little fighting and covered part of the flank of the US VII Corp which did the end around on Saddam's forces in Kuwait.
The point is that the Arab forces were there for political reasons but were not necessary for the actual military operation and did not really contribute to it. The US and British military like in so many other conflicts did nearly all the fighting. Coalition forces deployed to Iraq have seen far more fighting and have played a much more important role than non-US forces participating in the first Gulf War.
It would be a HUGE mistake to have Iraq's neighbors deploy troops inside the country. This would create stress and conflict among the ethnic groups in Iraq as opposed to decreasing it. Iraqi's would be far more distrussful of the deployment of a neighboring countries troops on its territory for obvious reasons. The only potential Arab State with forces that could be sent, without that problem, would be Egypt and they declined to participate. Whats more, the only way Egypt could deploy to the region is through transport from the US military.
In terms of percentages of force and number of countries, there is not much difference between the 1991 Gulf War force and the coalition in Iraq. You can't use neighboring Arab or other countries in Iraq because that could threaten and complicate the delicate political process in the country following the removal of Saddam's regime. These countries did not enter Iraq in 1991 either.