Is it time for Bush to call the Franco-Russian bluff on an Iraq resolution?

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Um, Hafiz Pasha is “crying poor”, in hopes of getting the contributors to actually cough up the money? Your quotes make it sound like somebody somewhere has absconded with the money. But the article goes on…

Pasha explained how this aid is getting whittled down: the $1.7 billion pledged for this year was followed up by firm commitments of only $1.1 billion. A total of $900 million has come in by way of actual disbursements, of which about 70 percent has gone into humanitarian relief, such as providing food and facilitating the return of refugees. That leaves about $250 million for actual reconstruction aid this year.

< snip >

Pasha declined to comment on the circumstances that cut the $1.7 billion of aid pledged this year nearly in half.

< snip >

But even the relatively small amount of aid going in for reconstruction is more than what some critics have thought. “The bottom line is that aid flow for reconstruction is not as bad as perceived, but it is slower than originally anticipated,” Pasha commented. Most importantly, the humanitarian aid component has shown significant results. Since March, more than a million Afghan refugees have returned to their homeland; much of this migration came from Pakistan.

And it sounds to me like it’s more of a quibble over how the money is being spent.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/south_asia/2359731.stm

Friday, 25 October, 2002, 04:50 GMT 05:50 UK
Afghanistan aid worry

The Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah, has said the money pledged so far by the international community to rebuild Afghanistan is not enough.

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Abdullah said most of the money is being spent on emergency humanitarian aid and not enough of it is being used for reconstruction.

And…tell me again what this has to do with Iraq?

[Henry_B]

HI Duck Duck!
You wrote:

And…tell me again what this has to do with Iraq?

Well If US or UN wants to put out Saddam, it will cost a bundle to build the country up.
If not built up, how on earth can there be a democracy after Saddam. Just because we say so?

I think there will be a new Saddam, as crazy as ever.

IF US or the world will interfiere by putting a party (like nazi-party = Baath) away and give the power to some exile, newly trained Iraqi rebels… Well, also bin Laden got trained by “the west”.

The big question is: What after Saddam? Whatever the answer is, it will cost heavy money. Or do You have an example of a country where it did not (and worked well).

[Tamerlane]

That was not an attack on Israel proper. It was an attack on Eqyptian territory being occupied by Israel. Israel itself has never been attacked since 1948.

Oh, come now. This is splitting hairs.

That last part is simply not true. The PLO had, in fact, honored a cease-fire for over a year, despite Israeli provocations. The Lebanon invasion didn’t even have a credible pretext.

I’m actually inclined to agree that the 1982 invasion was ill-advised and pretty flimsy which is why I said ‘even’. The main pretext seeming to have been the assasination of the Israeli ambassador in London and a single PLO ceasefire violation in May ( actually the ceasefire had been in effect for ten months I believe ) in response to an Israeli air raid ( the plan of course had been in the offing for many months and they were just looking for an excuse ). Nonetheless, it is understandable why the Israelis considered the PLO entrenchment in Lebanon such a threat.

As for the motivations, I mean, you can argue all day about who wants what, and there has certainly been plenty of talk of destroying Israel. The fact is, though, that Israel is by far the dominant military power in the region, and has been for several decades.

Agreed.

Israel itself has never been attacked, and has never been seriously threatened since 1948.

Disagree. It has been repeatedly attacked, even if not by regular military forces ( and not for lack of will to do so ) and its very position makes it perpetually threatened, at least as a stable functioning regime. Though I will say that IMHO its tactics often don’t help matters much.

Since this is a major source of conflict in the Middle East, it is imperative that Israel withdraw from these territories

I agree here as well. I am definitely in the ‘Land for Peace’ camp. The settlers in particular ( all due respect to certain posters ) are one of the biggest parts of the problem IMHO.

But I do think it is a little bit disingenuous to portray this as entirely or even mostly, a one-sided struggle. It is far more complex than that.

• Tamerlane

[SuaSponte]

*Originally posted by Chumpsky *
Is this a serious question? Well, if it is…

Less people would have died if the Israelis had not launched a war of aggression in 1967. You see, if there is no war, then less people die. In addition, the people caught in the territory the Israelis conquered would not have had to live under a brutal military occupation for 35 years running. Israeli propaganda notwithstanding, there was no threat that Israel would have been conquered by the Syrians and Egyptians in 1967. That is just laughable. It was Israel that started the war. In fact, Israel itself has never been attacked–all of its wars have been wars of aggression.

So, to sum up: without a war in 1967 less people would have died than died in the 1967 war.

So, you’ve never read anything about the Six Day War, have you? Egypt had ordered the UN peacekeeping troops to leave the Sinai and had closed the Straits of Tiran - an international waterway - to prohibit Israeli shipping. As you noted with the Reagan Administration efforts to mine Managua harbor, closing the straits was an act of war under international law. (BTW, two days before Israel attacked, Nasser ordered the attack on Israel. He delayed the order hours before the attack was to begin, but didn’t call it off.)

So yes, Egypt started the war. And no, I’m not an Israeli apologist.

So, there was a war, and Egypt intended to attack first. Does that change your analysis?

Sua

[SuaSponte]

by Chumpsky
quote:

Originally posted by SuaSponte
Um, Saddam’s never been at the top of my list. The current winner is the regime in Burma - but that’s another story.

Back in the 80s (well, at least during that part of the 80s where I actually knew anything about the outside world - I was 11 in 1980), the top of my list was the regime in El Salvador. Oh, and guess what? The Salvadoran regime was “a favored friend and ally of the U.S.” Sorry to disappoint you by demonstrating independent thought.

That is very curious, in light of the fact that many of the very same people who were propping up the Death Squad Democracy in El Salvador are now running the Bush White House. You have such luminaries as Otto Reich as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, former head of the Office of Public Diplomacy under Reagan/Bush, in charge of spreading lies about Nicaragua and El Salvador. You have John Negraponte as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., former ambassador to Honduras under Reagan/Bush, actually the Honduran proconsul, deeply involved in running the Contra terrorist war out of Honduras. You have Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, all heavily involved in the various terrorist activities of Reagan/Bush.

Why is that curious?

quote:

Why doesn’t any stop before posting this argument and recognize that it is inane? Your argument is this: “The U.S. has done bad things in the past. Therefore, it is not allowed to do good things in the future.”

It depends on what you mean by “the U.S.” If by “the U.S.” you mean Otto Reich, John Negraponte, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then we should be very skeptical. Given the massive amounts of blood dripping from their hands, it is unlikely that they have undergone a conversion. On the contrary, they seem to get ever more bold with their desires to dominate the world.

Actually, by “the U.S.,” I mean “the U.S.”

quote:

Well, wouldn’t it be nice to change that? To have a foreign policy motivated by humanitarian impulses and the desire to free oppressed people and punish/prevent genocide and democide?
And, gosh Becky, a lovely place to start such a policy would be to overthrow Saddam, who has already committed genocide against the Kurds and is currently in the process of committing genocide aginst the Ma’dan, colloquially known as the “Swamp Arabs.”

I am amazed that anybody can believe that an invasion of Iraq has anything whatsoever to do with “humanitarian impulses.” That just blows me away. In fact, it is inconceivable that current plans have anything to do with humanitarian impulses.

Actually, I don’t think that an invasion of Iraq has anything to do with “humanitarian impulses.” I do think that the effect would be to (a) capture and punish the perpetrators of genocide against the Kurds, as is required by the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, (b) end the genocide of the Ma’dan, as is also required by the Genocide Convention, and © end the repression of the Iraqi people by a totalitarian state, which, while not required by any international convention (unless you count the UN Conventions on Human Rights), seems like a nice thing to happen.

If you care about the welfare of the oppressed, you must oppose the single greatest factor in their oppression: western imperialism.

Wow. I thought you guys went out with lava lamps.

Given that the U.S. already controls Saudi Arabia, control of Iraq would give it an overwhelming domination over the world’s energy supplies.

And we disappear into fantasy land. If we “control” the Saudis, kindly explain why our “subjects” keep defying us? If I were the head of the American Empire, first thing I’d do with my subject Saudis was tell them to sign a peace treaty with Israel and open diplomatic relations. Next, I’d tell them to cooperate with investigations into terrorism. Third, I’d order them to stop giving billions to support madrasses and exporting Wahhabism, so young Muslims wouldn’t be indoctrinated into hating their lords and masters, the Americans. Why hasn’t the U.S. ordered any of these steps?

This is a common theme among your ilk: America is an evil omnipotent empire, yet it is utterly incompetent. It secretly or overtly controls the governments of half the world, yet it keeps forgetting to tell the countries they control to do basic and obvious things that would benefit the U.S.

Evil omnipotent empires are not incompetent. Put another way, incompetent people never get their act together well enough to take over the world.

Sua