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Thus, classical fascism should be the starting-point for our efforts to understand the People's Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the Fascist revolution, Mussolini dead and buried, the corporate state intact, the party still firmly in control, the nation governed by professional politicians and a corrupt elite rather than the true believers. No longer a system based on charisma, but on political repression, cynical not idealistic, and formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the "great Italian people," endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors.

That is China today. It may be with us quite a while.

Yet, that doesn't make it one bit more logically, legally, or morally correct.

I love the proof by assertion. So I think you are incorrect, and you think I am incorrect. Thats a big shocker.

Unfortunately for people who use this argument, that was a decision for the Security Council to make.

To repeat myself, I believe the Security Council did make this decision, over a dozen times, ending with the council affording Iraq one final chance to comply or face "serious consequences". I don't think that "If you don't comply we will keep talking about it" qualifies as a serious consequence.

No. The Security Council authorized this force because it was already there, lead by and composed almost entirely of US forces.

I find it interesting that you dismissed a direct quote from a relevant Security Council resolution about why they have authorized the multinational force in Iraq, and instead you pull this out of thin air without any evidence to support it. So I guess here we go again, from Resolution 1546 on why they authorized the force:

10. Decides that the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq...so that, inter alia, the United Nations can fulfil its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph seven above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and program for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities;

I can't speak to you personally, but supporters of your position refer to them as "multinational" forces because of the propaganda effect - it gives the US actions the appearance of world support and international legitimacy. What is the standard for "multinational"? Does one representative from any other government satisfy this word or does it actually require the active involvement and cooperation of multiple nations?

Is the effort to dismiss and denegrate the contributions of other states not also a propaganda effort to make the United States appear more isolated? The force is a "multinational force" because, well, it is made up from multiple nations, and I can't believe we are having this debate.

But you already won.

I tend to agree with people like Amir Taheri and the book by Ali Allawi that I am currently reading, that the war has been won, and now we need to "preserve" the victory.

I really can't figure out if you guys are being intentionally disingenuous about these claims linked back to the Deulfer report or if you really just don't get it.

Disingenuous, huh? I think it is disingenuous to ignore these facts:

• Resolution 687 "decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities; "
• There were a dozen other security council resolutions between 1992-2002 deploring Iraq's lack of compliance and subterfuge regarding this disarmament
• Resolution 1441, which recalled that the cease-fire was "based on acceptance by Iraq of the provisions" in 687, declares that "Iraq has been and remains in material breach" of that resolution
• Hans Blix come before the Security Council 2 months after 1441 was passed and stated that Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance - not even today - of the disarmament, which was demanded of it"
• UNMOVIC released a

But he is in it up to his neck for the same reason Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are: he's an oil man. Nothing more and nothing less. Oil and oil shares are the only things he cares about and he's as happy as the rest of them to kill a few hundred or thousands (especially if they are foreigners) to get them.

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous:

A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq, a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M'eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting showing Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet's capital after he fled from Mecca (16th c.); a portrait of Muhammad, his face covered with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th c.); an Isfahan miniature depicting the prophet with his favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th c.); Kamaleddin Behzad's miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced by a drop of sweat that fell from his face (19th c.); a painting, "Massacre of the Family of the Prophet," showing Muhammad watching as his grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala (19th c.); a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first followers (18th c.); and Kamal ul-Mulk's portrait of Muhammad showing the prophet holding the Quran in one hand while with the index finger of the other hand he points to the Oneness of God (19th c.).

I don't think containment applies in a 1 to 1 relationship between the Cold War and the fight against Islamic fundamentalists, but even with that said, your questions make a lot of sense. However, since this is as much a conflic of ideas as a military conflict, containing the acceptance of radical Islamic ideas is the real goal. The Soviets pushed their ideas through their standing military, and as you point out, radical Islam has no such center of gravity. But even though the Soviets had a center of gravity, we never were directly engaged there. It was always on the periphery. In the case of radical Islam, I would argue that the periphery is on the street in societies where Muslims make up a substantial percentage of the population. Give those people an alternative to radicalism, and the core radicals will not be able to spread their message. As they die off, nobody will replace them.

The notion that containment could serve as a viable strategy in fighting radical Islamic terrorists makes sense to me and to a lot of people who are smarter than me, but it also has its critics. This piece argues that containment failed and it was really "rollback" that finished off the USSR, which would mean that containment would be innefectual in the current situation as well.

The best writing I've encountered on the subject is this article by John Lewis Gaddis which argues that we can learn much from the containment policy first laid out by George Kennan, but that we must be flexible and not attempt to simply apply the same template to the war against radical Islam.

The fundamental goal they are striving for, however, is the for muslim states of the middle east to become Islamic states.

"The speaker said democracy was based on un-Islamic beliefs and behaviors such as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule.

He said that freedom of expression is allowed "even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy." He said Islam requires the rule of God and not the rule of "the majority or the people."

I am not questioning intent, I am questioning capability.

Aum Shinrikyo was a japanese cult...

A.Q. Kahn is considered the person responsible for the end of mutual assured destruction as a geopolitical doctrine. In this era of asymmetrical warfare and jetliners changing skylines in hours, do you really think that this is something we can afford to let go?

In theory the US has a vast and powerful foreign intelligence agency (NSA) that is supposed to be good at tracing and shutting down money flowing into terrorist causes. ... All the rest - the tromping around of military, the random security measures applied piecemeal to random points of infrastructure in the US, the arrests of terrorist cells (usually innocent) - that's all for show.

I'm afraid that the military stuff is not an option, it is essential. While religious zealots may be able to mobilize people to support would-be mass-murderers, it's going to be more difficult to obtain support if it means the likelihood of tanks rolling through your streets and Marines grabbing the conspirators in house-to-house raids. There's no reason to let a terrorist conspiracy fester and build itself up when we'd send hundreds of agents and a SWAT team to take down a criminal conspiracy with a small fraction of the potential for harm. I pay my taxes so that the government will do its best to stop the people who want to harm or kill me, and living in a foreign country and having murder as one of your sacraments doesn't give you a free pass.

Certainly "everyone does it" is not an excuse for his large expense account. And if true, there is no excuse for his bullying behavior. What I don't see is evidence that other officials were subjected to the same level of audits, with the same consequences if their expense numbers were too high. As this article suggests, many other officials could be caught (or have been caught) with the same or larger expenses for food and travel. He may have been a bullying boss as well, but again, how many other officials have been kicked out for that?

GR was warning Canadians not to lose the privacy rights already lost to those in the US. His replacement seems to think privacy is not a right but simply a value, so that the 'right to privacy' is much less like the "right to vote" and much more like the value of good butter tarts.

And Canada has now become much better at "sharing" its information with the US. I'd want to say that's a problem for Canadians whose info has been given to the US, because who could those Canadians complain to? But then here in the US US citizens themselves don't have a right to review or correct what information the feds have- no matter how incorrect it is or how harmful incorrect information can be. Would Canada be less likely to share if GR was still commissioner? I'd be inclined to think yes.

Ah, I understand. I thought it was some sort of anti-Jewish thing for a second. And yes, slashdot does seem to be littered with people with certain types of mental inadequacies.

> although communist in name, China is more fascist than communist at the present.

Intriguing. Here are a couple relevant blogs, for those who are interested:

Scroll down to April 22, 2003

From Communism to Fascism?

3rd post ... looks like we might have a winner here!

http://www.benadorassociates.com/mylroie.php