Libya was and still is secular in nature and was very much cozying up to the Soviets at the time. When Reagan attacked Tripoli many observers were very nervous about how the Soviets would react to this. The PLO also sought Soviet support at the time and had a rather secular outlook. Hamas was not an important factor back then. Hezbollah was sponsored by Syria which again was supported by the Soviets. All conflicts in this ear were permeated by the cold war stand-off and aligned with one superpower or the other. Denying this is revisionism. Of course many of these conflicts did not vanish after the clod war and ignoring them allowed them to fester but the fact that the Soviets did not back Anti-American forces any more initially made the world safer. There is no new quality in Al Quada's terror. They just got lucky and made a huge difference in quantity on September 11th. Yet, hijacking jet planes is as low tech as it gets and was a well established terrorist approach long before then.
You may want to brush up your terrorism history. During the cold war many European countries had to deal with Communist terror organizations such as the RAF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Fraction . Just type in any Western EU country into the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base at http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp and see for yourself. Those terrorist organizations were often indirectly sponsored by the Soviets and always Anti-American.
Nevertheless the largest attack against US forces was actually carried out in Beirut by Hizbollah against US marines after which Reagan immediately "cut and run" from Lebanon.
Terror incidents have been a constant backdrop throughout the cold war. Yet somehow the West managed to win this war without losing its soul. According to you this should have been impossible.
Criminal law has been good enough during the cold war. When putting espionage on trial you also have to deal with evidence that may jeopardize state security but America managed to deal with the Soviet threat without compromising habeas corpuse or the Geneva convention. Do you honestly believe that a bunch of terrorists can not be beaten back without compromising these bedrock American pricinples?
I am a German who used to live in the US - NC to be precise. As a high school student our history curriculum concentrated heavily on the 20th century German history in order to ensure that German students know that a democratic republic can collapse without an open revolt. Hitler never had a majority in parliament but he managed to get to absolute power through legal means one baby step at a time. The political process of erosion in the US highly unsettled me. It didn't help that much of what passes as journalism on outfits like FOX reminded me unpleasantly of the propaganda that the GDR would broadcast into West-Germany when I grew up. I decided that the US was not the right country to raise my children in and I moved to Canada this summer. Reading things like this http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,439889, 00.html confirms to me that this was the right decision. It really feels that America is ever closer inching towards the abyss.
Every tyrant in history claimed to love and protect the people. Your observation is beyond trivial. The constitution was carefully designed to prevent to much concentration of power in one hand. Currently we see this dismantling befor our very eyes all in the name of "protecting the people". Cheerleading this process is as Un-American as can be but passes as patriotism in this Orwell world of ours.
What is it with peoples' reading abilities? Stating the obvious that the USA has an awful lot of enemies and is way to much hated in the world does not equate to stating that America is evil or any such thing.
Is it not crystal clear logic that the number of your enemies will determine your security if other defense becomes increasingly impossible? In reality it will not matter if whatever beef these enemies have is justified or not. The question if America is a force for good or evil is mute. What matters is that it'll not be perceived as evil. Unfortunately on that front surveys of countries that create terrorism problems for the US (i.e. almost the entire Middle East) show that the trend goes exactly the other way.
My comment in wishing America luck in the endeavor to reduce its number of enemies may sound sarcastic but it is actually far from it. I have friends and family in the US and lived there myself until recently. I don't want any harm to come to America but I seriously think that the US only has a time window of 20 years at most to generate the kind of goodwill that will be essential for a society to stay safe in a world where active protection won't work any more.
Actually I went a step further and left the country:)
Feel much saver up here in Canada. My first kid was born in the states and I do not appreciate that US foreign policy puts him a higher risk of becoming a terror target than if he'd has a passport of a different nationality.
You may think that sound hyperventilatingly histerical but I like to travel and there are parts of the world were a US passport puts you at a higher risk than for instance a Swedish one.
The linked article makes some good points but it really does not matter so much what Westerners think rather it is crucial how populations in mostly 3rd world countries perceive the US. After all that is where most of the terrorism currently originates. If security becomes impossible - and I think that this is an accurate prediction - then terrorists will rule the day. Unless the US will be perceived as more benevolent America will remain front and center in the crosshair. Although I am not American until recently I lived in NC but this summer I moved to Canada. This reasoning did play into my decision making process. I think Canada is all around a saver place to bring up my kids.
Enough independant scholars have combed over it to not leave a doubt that the "badge for Jews" story was a complete fabrication. What the legislation actually tries to promote is native Iranian clothing styles to strengthen the Iranian textile industry.
Nice try on your part though:-) Want to play some more?
Chapter 5 paragraph 7 discusses the covenant known as Thimmi.
According to Thimmi, Christian and Jewish people that live in the Muslim countries have the right to practice their religious rituals and they are equal to Muslim people in terms of personal rights. It is therefore stated that "not a single instance can be quoted to show that the Holy Prophet ever brought the pressure of the sword to bear on one individual, let alone a whole nation, to embrace Islam."
The text goes on to discuss that this Islamic principle was often compromised in practice.
No offense intended but you really are the ultimate poster boy for black and white thinking.
Exhibit A:
Even this most superficial of differences goes away if the victim says "No, I will NOT convert" and ends up being killed just like the ones being killed for being of the wrong "race".
Let's repeat this one more time: There is a sizeable Jewish community in Iran that indeed is not willing to convert, but yet they are not killed by the Iranian government. And that is what is meant by having the freedom to practice their religion.
It does not equate being free from discrimination on a religious basis Yet it is infinitely better than an eliminationistic ideology that employs all the government's resources to systematically kill humans like cattle. The fact that you can not see the difference is frankly startling and a little bit frightening. It is the difference between being dead or leading a fairly complete life practicing your religion in the open. How can you brush aside a difference so fundamental as life and death as superficial? It is like arguing that a kidnapper who does not kill is as bad as a murderer. Both are criminals but there is a reason why the law punishes them differently.
What it means is that you do not recognize that the situation can still get much worse for Jews in Iran. It follows that you do not understand that a policy that truly has the best interest of minority Iranians at heart has to be very well thought out so that it won't terribly back-fire.
Just a quick comment on style: It'll help your argument if you provide some links to unbiased sources to back up the points you make.
It also does not help to argue against straw-man arguments that I did not make. I did not claim that Jews or Christians have the same rights as Muslims in Iran nor did I state tht they enjoy equal participation in society. I was merely pointing out that there is Jewish community in Iran and that they are free to practice their religion and that is indeed a fact.
"It merely substitutes rabid hatred based on race with rabid hatred based on religion. It's pretty much the same thing."
If you fail to see the difference in degree than I guess I am indeed wasting my breath. Race as defined by a Nazi ideology is a immutable attribute of an individual. In a Nazi's mind this person can not be converted to anything to make him "better" and is inborn inferior and only extermination is the cure.
Not all evil is created equal. In failing to differentiate you weaken yourself and diminish your chances of fighting it intelligently.
Don't want to make Iran look good, but believing in a ahistoric analogy won't help you either - as such you may want to take into account that Iran still has a sizable Jewish population that is free to exercise their religion http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html.
The anti-Zionism found in the Arab ME does not follow the pattern of a Nazi ideology that was racially motivated - nothing but the destruction of the inferior race will do in the mind of a convinced Nazi. The Qur'an on the other hand recognizes the other theistic religions - Judaism and Christianity - and mandates tolerance towards them.
Thanks to the Internet this is not necessarily so. There are many Iraqi blogs in English out there and you also have access to a huge spectrum of non-American English media. It takes more work than to listen to some talking head on TV but in this day and age I do not buy your statement because it completely contradicts my own experience. I have been following the war very closely (partly because my investments are sensitive to the oil price and geopolitical stability) and just using free Internet sources I feel very confident that I have a pretty accurate picture of the Iraqi situation as well as for the build-up for an Iran intervention.
At 50 to 60 death per day (numbers from Alawi quote) the Iraqi internal strife exceeds the average death toll of the 15 years Lebanon civil war of an estimated 100,000. Go ahead, I know you can do the math yourself.
They wanted to bring the country into a civil war with the Golden Mosque bombings and related attacks, they have failed.
What news sources are you consuming? The amount of violence in Iraq certainly qualifies as low intensity civil war by any conventional measure. And the situation has been continuously deteriorating. Denying this will just set us up for a colossal failure. Even Alawi who has been the US most favorite Iraqi politician (not counting Chalabi) has said as much. Now even Basra is starting to come unglued. A trend that started last year when militias infiltrated the police force is now playing out. A development that was entirely predictable when the US failed to unarm and disband the Shia militias while dissolving the old Iraqi army (probably the worst blunder of the whole occupation saga - and there have been so many!).
The Basra security situation is very bad news.
Sorry my friend, but I will certainly take the former Iraqi PM's assement over yours. You may want to check out some broader spectrum of news sites to protect yourself from falling for spin.
Indeed to try to drag out the whole Plame affair is beyond the scope of this thread and/. is not a good place for this discussion anyway. At any rate your question:
As for his wife, since when is it a bad thing to know when a government employee uses nepotism to send an unqualified relative on a sensitive mission?
is completely beside the point. Even if this claim was true - and we only have the word of the administration for this - it does not matter as far as the law is concerned. Plame was under cover. If she wasn't there'd be no investigation. This means that every front-business that she ever pretended to worked for and all foreign sources that she ever cultivated have been exposed by this little character smear that Rove, Libby et.al. engaged in. A character smear that you obviously bought into. Strange how ambassador Wilson turned into such a lying weasel when back in the day Bush Sr. gave him a most glowing review. Odd back then conservatives loved this guy.
If you have not noticed by now the pattern that every person who takes this administration to task in a serious manner is vilified than you have some serious perceptions issues. Just of the top of my head: Clark, Scowcroft, Murtha and any retired general who has the odacity to critice the war plan receives the same treatment. All of them have in common that they are hard core patriots who have dedicated large parts of their live to serve their country.
If you love your country more than GOP talking points you may want to readjust your BS detector.
Well, this soldier died in an accident. Not sure if it's fair to count this. Fact is Bosnia was fought and won by the air force campaign. That there were no troops on the ground was heavily criticized at the time as Serbian militias conducted ethnic cleansings in Albania. But it goes to show how much this kept American troops out of harms way. At the beginning of the war the Serbs did captured some GIs on the border and exploited them for propaganda purposes. This did create quite some media stir - with camera crews camping on the front lawn of the poor soldier's family homes. So I really don't see how you can make the point that the media did not pay attention to this.
The death count is really on an entirely different scale in Iraq and from my point of view this is anything but over-reported. Especially since you only hear about the death count - the number of severely injured soldiers is not even released.
why do people keep saying it takes courage to disrespect the United States? Freedom of speech is so fundamental, you can even tell blatant lies about those in power and never have negative consequences.
Try and explain this to ambassador Wilson who BTW - just as Colbert - was not disrespectful to the United States but did write and say things this administration did not want to hear.
Just because this government has fortunately not yet the power of a dictatorship does not mean that they won't use any means and influence at their disposal to damage their perceived enemies. The Valerie Plame case demonstrates that in that pursuit they even won't hesitate to break the law if they think they can get away with it.
Clinton did not put any boots on the ground in Bosnia. That is why no GIs died in this war. If there had been casualties it would have been devestating for Clinton. The right wing punditry hated that war.
Slashdot Mirror
... did North Korea get its hands on Saddam's missing WMDs?
Libya was and still is secular in nature and was very much cozying up to the Soviets at the time. When Reagan attacked Tripoli many observers were very nervous about how the Soviets would react to this. The PLO also sought Soviet support at the time and had a rather secular outlook. Hamas was not an important factor back then. Hezbollah was sponsored by Syria which again was supported by the Soviets. All conflicts in this ear were permeated by the cold war stand-off and aligned with one superpower or the other. Denying this is revisionism. Of course many of these conflicts did not vanish after the clod war and ignoring them allowed them to fester but the fact that the Soviets did not back Anti-American forces any more initially made the world safer. There is no new quality in Al Quada's terror. They just got lucky and made a huge difference in quantity on September 11th. Yet, hijacking jet planes is as low tech as it gets and was a well established terrorist approach long before then.
You may want to brush up your terrorism history. During the cold war many European countries had to deal with Communist terror organizations such as the RAF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Fraction . Just type in any Western EU country into the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base at http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp and see for yourself. Those terrorist organizations were often indirectly sponsored by the Soviets and always Anti-American.
b rary2/achille.html.
q ue_bombing.
Nevertheless the largest attack against US forces was actually carried out in Beirut by Hizbollah against US marines after which Reagan immediately "cut and run" from Lebanon.
Then there was the especially despicable hijacking of the Achille Lauro http://www.specialoperations.com/Images_Folder/li
Of course all the terror Gaddafi sponsored should not be forgotten either. Lockerbie claiming the most victims http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 but it was the bombing of a Berlin discotheque that claimed the lives of GIs that prompted Reagan to bomb Tripolis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_Berlin_discothe
Terror incidents have been a constant backdrop throughout the cold war. Yet somehow the West managed to win this war without losing its soul. According to you this should have been impossible.
Criminal law has been good enough during the cold war. When putting espionage on trial you also have to deal with evidence that may jeopardize state security but America managed to deal with the Soviet threat without compromising habeas corpuse or the Geneva convention. Do you honestly believe that a bunch of terrorists can not be beaten back without compromising these bedrock American pricinples?
The fact that the US government held a US citizen for three years without him having access to a lawyer is also a fact.
l leged_terrorist)
, 00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_(a
Apparently some fear this will become more wide-spread practice more than they fear future terror attacks.
Given the bill that the Senate just passed this does not seem such an outlandish concern
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,439889
Now that's finally a truely insightfull comment. Thanks for passing this on.
I am a German who used to live in the US - NC to be precise. As a high school student our history curriculum concentrated heavily on the 20th century German history in order to ensure that German students know that a democratic republic can collapse without an open revolt. Hitler never had a majority in parliament but he managed to get to absolute power through legal means one baby step at a time. The political process of erosion in the US highly unsettled me. It didn't help that much of what passes as journalism on outfits like FOX reminded me unpleasantly of the propaganda that the GDR would broadcast into West-Germany when I grew up. I decided that the US was not the right country to raise my children in and I moved to Canada this summer. Reading things like this http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,439889, 00.html confirms to me that this was the right decision. It really feels that America is ever closer inching towards the abyss.
Every tyrant in history claimed to love and protect the people. Your observation is beyond trivial. The constitution was carefully designed to prevent to much concentration of power in one hand. Currently we see this dismantling befor our very eyes all in the name of "protecting the people". Cheerleading this process is as Un-American as can be but passes as patriotism in this Orwell world of ours.
What is it with peoples' reading abilities? Stating the obvious that the USA has an awful lot of enemies and is way to much hated in the world does not equate to stating that America is evil or any such thing.
Is it not crystal clear logic that the number of your enemies will determine your security if other defense becomes increasingly impossible? In reality it will not matter if whatever beef these enemies have is justified or not. The question if America is a force for good or evil is mute. What matters is that it'll not be perceived as evil. Unfortunately on that front surveys of countries that create terrorism problems for the US (i.e. almost the entire Middle East) show that the trend goes exactly the other way.
My comment in wishing America luck in the endeavor to reduce its number of enemies may sound sarcastic but it is actually far from it. I have friends and family in the US and lived there myself until recently. I don't want any harm to come to America but I seriously think that the US only has a time window of 20 years at most to generate the kind of goodwill that will be essential for a society to stay safe in a world where active protection won't work any more.
Actually I went a step further and left the country :)
Feel much saver up here in Canada. My first kid was born in the states and I do not appreciate that US foreign policy puts him a higher risk of becoming a terror target than if he'd has a passport of a different nationality.
You may think that sound hyperventilatingly histerical but I like to travel and there are parts of the world were a US passport puts you at a higher risk than for instance a Swedish one.
The linked article makes some good points but it really does not matter so much what Westerners think rather it is crucial how populations in mostly 3rd world countries perceive the US. After all that is where most of the terrorism currently originates. If security becomes impossible - and I think that this is an accurate prediction - then terrorists will rule the day. Unless the US will be perceived as more benevolent America will remain front and center in the crosshair. Although I am not American until recently I lived in NC but this summer I moved to Canada. This reasoning did play into my decision making process. I think Canada is all around a saver place to bring up my kids.
... enforcable means that your only security will be in reducing the amount of enemies and hate directed towards you. Good luck with that America!
This is a myth that has been thouroughly debunked.
:) http://www.ilna.ir/shownews.asp?code=305929&code1= 11
:-) Want to play some more?
Jewish Iran ex-pats have also spoken up to dispell this nonsense.
The original legislation is actually online but it is in Persian.
bablesfish won't help there
Enough independant scholars have combed over it to not leave a doubt that the "badge for Jews" story was a complete fabrication. What the legislation actually tries to promote is native Iranian clothing styles to strengthen the Iranian textile industry.
Nice try on your part though
According to this dissertation (from the University of Berlin)
h -mohamed-2005-07-07/HTML/chapter5.html#N1045A
http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertationen/al-awabde
Chapter 5 paragraph 7 discusses the covenant known as Thimmi.
According to Thimmi, Christian and Jewish people that live in the Muslim countries have the right to practice their religious rituals and they are equal to Muslim people in terms of personal rights. It is therefore stated that "not a single instance can be quoted to show that the Holy Prophet ever brought the pressure of the sword to bear on one individual, let alone a whole nation, to embrace Islam."
The text goes on to discuss that this Islamic principle was often compromised in practice.
Links please. Muslims obviously tell this story a bit different http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_301_350/shar iah.htm.
No offense intended but you really are the ultimate poster boy for black and white thinking.
Exhibit A:
Even this most superficial of differences goes away if the victim says "No, I will NOT convert" and ends up being killed just like the ones being killed for being of the wrong "race".
Let's repeat this one more time: There is a sizeable Jewish community in Iran that indeed is not willing to convert, but yet they are not killed by the Iranian government. And that is what is meant by having the freedom to practice their religion.
It does not equate being free from discrimination on a religious basis Yet it is infinitely better than an eliminationistic ideology that employs all the government's resources to systematically kill humans like cattle. The fact that you can not see the difference is frankly startling and a little bit frightening. It is the difference between being dead or leading a fairly complete life practicing your religion in the open. How can you brush aside a difference so fundamental as life and death as superficial? It is like arguing that a kidnapper who does not kill is as bad as a murderer. Both are criminals but there is a reason why the law punishes them differently.
What it means is that you do not recognize that the situation can still get much worse for Jews in Iran. It follows that you do not understand that a policy that truly has the best interest of minority Iranians at heart has to be very well thought out so that it won't terribly back-fire.
Just a quick comment on style: It'll help your argument if you provide some links to unbiased sources to back up the points you make.
It also does not help to argue against straw-man arguments that I did not make. I did not claim that Jews or Christians have the same rights as Muslims in Iran nor did I state tht they enjoy equal participation in society. I was merely pointing out that there is Jewish community in Iran and that they are free to practice their religion and that is indeed a fact.
"It merely substitutes rabid hatred based on race with rabid hatred based on religion. It's pretty much the same thing."
If you fail to see the difference in degree than I guess I am indeed wasting my breath. Race as defined by a Nazi ideology is a immutable attribute of an individual. In a Nazi's mind this person can not be converted to anything to make him "better" and is inborn inferior and only extermination is the cure.
Not all evil is created equal. In failing to differentiate you weaken yourself and diminish your chances of fighting it intelligently.
Don't want to make Iran look good, but believing in a ahistoric analogy won't help you either - as such you may want to take into account that Iran still has a sizable Jewish population that is free to exercise their religion http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html.
The anti-Zionism found in the Arab ME does not follow the pattern of a Nazi ideology that was racially motivated - nothing but the destruction of the inferior race will do in the mind of a convinced Nazi. The Qur'an on the other hand recognizes the other theistic religions - Judaism and Christianity - and mandates tolerance towards them.
Again, it's hard to say way over here
Thanks to the Internet this is not necessarily so. There are many Iraqi blogs in English out there and you also have access to a huge spectrum of non-American English media. It takes more work than to listen to some talking head on TV but in this day and age I do not buy your statement because it completely contradicts my own experience. I have been following the war very closely (partly because my investments are sensitive to the oil price and geopolitical stability) and just using free Internet sources I feel very confident that I have a pretty accurate picture of the Iraqi situation as well as for the build-up for an Iran intervention.
At 50 to 60 death per day (numbers from Alawi quote) the Iraqi internal strife exceeds the average death toll of the 15 years Lebanon civil war of an estimated 100,000. Go ahead, I know you can do the math yourself.
They wanted to bring the country into a civil war with the Golden Mosque bombings and related attacks, they have failed.
What news sources are you consuming? The amount of violence in Iraq certainly qualifies as low intensity civil war by any conventional measure. And the situation has been continuously deteriorating. Denying this will just set us up for a colossal failure. Even Alawi who has been the US most favorite Iraqi politician (not counting Chalabi) has said as much. Now even Basra is starting to come unglued. A trend that started last year when militias infiltrated the police force is now playing out. A development that was entirely predictable when the US failed to unarm and disband the Shia militias while dissolving the old Iraqi army (probably the worst blunder of the whole occupation saga - and there have been so many!).
The Basra security situation is very bad news.
Sorry my friend, but I will certainly take the former Iraqi PM's assement over yours. You may want to check out some broader spectrum of news sites to protect yourself from falling for spin.
Indeed to try to drag out the whole Plame affair is beyond the scope of this thread and /. is not a good place for this discussion anyway. At any rate your question:
As for his wife, since when is it a bad thing to know when a government employee uses nepotism to send an unqualified relative on a sensitive mission?
is completely beside the point. Even if this claim was true - and we only have the word of the administration for this - it does not matter as far as the law is concerned. Plame was under cover. If she wasn't there'd be no investigation. This means that every front-business that she ever pretended to worked for and all foreign sources that she ever cultivated have been exposed by this little character smear that Rove, Libby et.al. engaged in. A character smear that you obviously bought into. Strange how ambassador Wilson turned into such a lying weasel when back in the day Bush Sr. gave him a most glowing review. Odd back then conservatives loved this guy.
If you have not noticed by now the pattern that every person who takes this administration to task in a serious manner is vilified than you have some serious perceptions issues. Just of the top of my head: Clark, Scowcroft, Murtha and any retired general who has the odacity to critice the war plan receives the same treatment. All of them have in common that they are hard core patriots who have dedicated large parts of their live to serve their country.
If you love your country more than GOP talking points you may want to readjust your BS detector.
Well, this soldier died in an accident. Not sure if it's fair to count this. Fact is Bosnia was fought and won by the air force campaign. That there were no troops on the ground was heavily criticized at the time as Serbian militias conducted ethnic cleansings in Albania. But it goes to show how much this kept American troops out of harms way. At the beginning of the war the Serbs did captured some GIs on the border and exploited them for propaganda purposes. This did create quite some media stir - with camera crews camping on the front lawn of the poor soldier's family homes. So I really don't see how you can make the point that the media did not pay attention to this.
The death count is really on an entirely different scale in Iraq and from my point of view this is anything but over-reported. Especially since you only hear about the death count - the number of severely injured soldiers is not even released.
why do people keep saying it takes courage to disrespect the United States? Freedom of speech is so fundamental, you can even tell blatant lies about those in power and never have negative consequences.
Try and explain this to ambassador Wilson who BTW - just as Colbert - was not disrespectful to the United States but did write and say things this administration did not want to hear.
Just because this government has fortunately not yet the power of a dictatorship does not mean that they won't use any means and influence at their disposal to damage their perceived enemies. The Valerie Plame case demonstrates that in that pursuit they even won't hesitate to break the law if they think they can get away with it.
Clinton did not put any boots on the ground in Bosnia. That is why no GIs died in this war. If there had been casualties it would have been devestating for Clinton. The right wing punditry hated that war.