What were those other sites?
Most variations on aljazeera .com, .net, and .org are registered names.
SimonX, I’m not clear about your post, and particularly, which site you have been browsing. The one I suspect of being bogus, linked in my previous post, carried a story yesterday titled, “US Delegation arrived in Amman in its way to Baghdad for cease-fire negotiations”. I can’t reference the article now, but IIRC, it suggested the delegation was led by Dick Cheney’s daughter, who was the “deputy secretary of foreign affairs for the middle east region” or some title similar to that effect.
I’ve located bogus stories about Dick Cheney’s daughter being a human shield, but nothing about being a US official heading up cease-fire negotiations.
Lib I think this is the root of the disconnect. Not everyone believes that power corrupts. There are plenty of people who believe that a parochial government, a tribe if you will, will be led by a father figure who will genuinely care about, and take care of, his people. This is obviously not the libertarian view as it abrogates a large percentage of authority to some other person who may or may not abuse it at their discretion. Sometimes people who want a father figure end up betrayed, as with Saddam, but other times it works well. Essentially there IS such a thing as a benevolent dictatorship. As others have noted the tribal feelings of many Iraqis(and many Arabic societies) would likely unbalance a democratic system by voting along tribal lines instead of interests.
The Iraqi people don’t want butchers and gangsters, they want fathers, providers, protectors, and tribal elders. That’s what they’re interested in, that’s what they’re used to, that’s what they understand. Leaders who feel a familial connection with their subjects and care for them and protect them as they would their children. What you call “myopic” is a desire for familial/tribal closeness. I don’t understand why you have such difficulty understanding this, especially given your Native American background.
Quite frankly I’m not sure if having such a leader(a benevolent dictator who is in power for life) is any better or worse than having a leader who has to cowtow to public opinion 24/7 in order to ensure they get re-elected. It seems that a leader who genuinely had the best interests of the people in mind(as a true tribal leader would) and was in office for life would be able to make the kind of long-term decisions that our elected officials rarely can. A decision which runs against current popular opinion but benefits the tribe in the long run. Also, remember that most of Saddam’s atrocities are against peoples that are not members of his “tribe”. They were against rival tribes or long-time enemies such as the Kurds. Unacceptable in modern times and a global framework, but to a tribal mind it is still the tribe skirmishing with another tribe. The Native Americans did that often enough too.
Enjoy,
Steven
Essentially, not everyone believes “Lifelong leader with a very large amount of power = gangster, thug, murderer, etc.” If someone abuses their trust then that doesn’t make them give up on the system, just give up on that specific leader.
Enjoy,
Steven
Just to follow up on the assorted english al-jazeera sites which don’t seem to be panning out… One thing you can do is go to this site and type www.al-jazeera.com into the translator tool. It doesn’t translate everything, but you get bits and pieces and that’s better than nothing all.
erm… it would work if the al-jazeera site wasn’t down.
It was the site you linked to. I read that particular stoy you are talking about. I never thought much about it though. I’ll be a better Doper. ZDNet has an article about it and so does the Wash Post.
Neither of these mentions the alternate links
Two questions, for anybody who wants to take a shot.
First:
I remember vaguely reading somewhere something about Islamic philosophy, so I’m looking for more information, clarification, correction, or whatever. Specifically, it was about the debate within Islam of when it’s acceptable to conduct holy war. The bin Laden types go hog-wild; others say they’re out of line.
Apparently, according to what I read, there’s only place where Mohammed and the Quran are absolutely unambiguous about the issue. It’s something along the lines of, “Make peace with everyone you can. But if they come to take your land and push you from your home, go ahead and kill the shit out of them.”
I wish I could remember it better, but that was the gist of it. The point is, it seems to me that would be a pretty fundamental element to the mindset of people in the region, which anyone contemplating a military invasion would do well to consider. And given that the only awareness I’ve heard GW Bush displaying of Muslim philosophy is that bin Laden probably doesn’t light a menorah, I worry that his team has gone tramping in without much understanding of the people they say they’re trying to liberate.
So is my recollection of that thing I read and can’t find now accurate? Is it really that important?
Second:
I’m struck by the details of the discussion regarding Bush team’s utterly wrongheaded diplomacy in pursuit of this war. It seems as though they couldn’t be more inappropriate about it if they tried. This started months ago, with Bush’s ill-considered reference to a “crusade,” and continues through the present.
So I have to wonder: Why?
Do they keep making these blunders because they just plain don’t know what they’re doing? Given all the sparkly goodness we heard about “hiring the best people,” I’m stunned at their apparent incompetence. I mean, some of them are clearly blinded by ideology, Wolfowitz for example. But you’d think they’d have somebody who could help them avoid the obvious mistakes.
Unless they’re making these mistakes on purpose? Is that even possible?
See, I’m concerned that they’re treating this whole situation like a tower of Jenga blocks. Maybe they can pull out Iraq without making the whole thing fall over. But then maybe not; maybe it causes the structure to collapse into a horrible mess. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing, if they regard it as rotten and corrupt and horribly unstable from top to bottom anyway. Sure, it’ll be painful in the short and medium term, and it’s a staggeringly huge roll of the dice, but hey, you can’t rebuild from scratch without clearing the playing surface.
And I don’t think it’s at all far-fetched to think that the adminstration isn’t being up-front about their motives. It’s pretty clear, for example, that a big part of their push for war was pulling the rug out from under the United Nations, which Wolfowitz and his neo-con compatriots utterly loathe. They couldn’t say so, of course, but it’s obvious to any observer with more than two brain cells. I’m not saying it was the primary motivator; I’m not even sure there is a single primary motivator. Rather, I think this war gives them an opportunity to pursue a whole heapin’ helping of what they see as desirable objectives in one convenient package.
So my second question, summed up, is this: Is their bungling the result of arrogance and ignorance, or is it a calculated incompetence?
The more of the current administration’s attempts at foreign policy I see, the more I’m in favor of a Constitutional requirement that the President have lived overseas for at least a few months. either cumulatively or (preferably) at one shot.
(Oh, and **Collounsbury, ** I knew it was late afternoon where you are - Moscow is in, or nearly in the same time zone, after all - I was referringto those in the U.S. who seem to be posting at all hours of the day and night. Are all denizens of GD a bunch of obsessive insomniacs?)
And I’d be interested to hear takes on the following article:
DRUMBEAT OF WAR [warning: long, but interesting]
Past Mideast Invasions Faced Unexpected Perils
Invaders Have Been Repelled While Arab Casualties Mount
By HUGH POPE and PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"As President Bush steers the U.S. toward war, history
offers a sobering lesson. For two centuries, foreign powers have been conquering
Mideast lands for their own purposes, promising to
uplift Arab societies along the way. Sometimes they have
modernized cities, taught new ideas and brought
technologies.
But in nearly every incursion, both sides have endured a
raft of unintended consequences. From Napoleon’s drive
into Egypt through Britain’s rule of Iraq in the 1920s
to Israel’s march into Lebanon in 1982, Middle East
nations have tempted conquerors only to send them
reeling."
I have a question for Coll: does the Zev Chafets, Ann Coulture and Pat Robertson colums get thoroughly read in the Arab world, and serve to reinforce their anti-American and, sadly, their anti-Semetist leanings?
Eva Luna
To answer your insomniac question for me, yes, I am insomniac at the present. I’m getting over 13 hour jet lag. I came down with a bad head cold on the way back from Bangkok and I didn’t sleep due to crying babies and drunk loud guy conversation next to me on the Tokyo-Seattle leg. To boot, the head cold nearly led me to rupture an eardrum as I failed to autoinsufflate my tympanic membranes due to congestion in my Eustachian tubes. Yeah, my ears didn’t pop. So Sudafed (a stimulant), Afrin (a stimulant), and Excedrin (a stimulant) at high doses for two days means basically no sleep. So yeah, I’m pretty fucked up. Right now, at least.
Another question to field to the group. The US is getting set to present a Israel/Palestine roadmap. Sharon being in the situation he is in, sitting in a rightist government, I betcha he will probably find reason to reject it, even though the situation is amongst the calmest it has been in months, construction of a separation wall continues, he had a hard time forming a government and his mandate is crumbling (I hope). Do you think this will precipitate anything larger scale?
Next for the readers of this thread in general, as each day of talking heads on CNN and FoxNews and the networks passes, I really am itching to start a Pit or GD thread entitled “Stripping away American propoganda.” It just pisses me off so much the shit that we are being told to swallow. “This coalition is more broad than the one put together for 1991.” OK, we don’t have France, Saudi, or Russia in this one, but thank the Sweet Lord Jebus that we have Pulau and Belize! Do you think this would be a bad idea at the moment? I know it is kind of pussy to ask it here, but with the multitude of threads on the subject and the high feeling around, adding into the fact that I have been completely absent from the Boards for 3 weeks and thus separated from the SDMB Zeitgeist, I just wanna know.
**
I’d posit that given the state of Israel’s economy, and likely further losses there as a result of the Iraq war reducing tourism even further, Sharon can play the defiant Rumpelstiltzkin not much longer. Without US financial aid, he’s toast, and Europe being his largest trade partner will especially now think twice how much crap they are going to take from him.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of that ‘support’ has been ensured by blatant blackmail, threatening to revoke any and all foreign aid to a number of countries if they fail to provide support.
No. What makes you think it would be? I say to go for it.
You can see it either way, in my opinion, but given the serious lack of worldliness, awareness, and long term vision of the Bush administration I would think it’s mainly a result of arrogance and ignorance. In the end, this behaviour will play against the US’s interests, not in favour of them, so it would be downright criminal for an administration to deliberately bungle the approach to war just to, e.g., undermine the UN or some other such inane goal.
I could not agree more, and such a thread would definitely be welcome by this poster. I’ve had a number of run-ins on these boards with what can only be described as victims of the flow of propaganda coming out of the Bush administration. A thread dedicated to stripping the worst offences could be both interesting and useful to other discussions. For maximum effect, the propaganda items leading up to this war ought to be considered as well, since they make up the foundations of the predicament, as it were.
Alas, I think this week’s entire issue of The Onion is depressingly on-point, particularly these bits:
"Point-Counterpoint: The War On Iraq
This War Will Destabilize the Entire Mideast Region and Set Off a Global Shockwave of Anti-Americanism
http://www.theonion.com/onion3911/pt_the_war_on_iraq.html
No, It Won’t"
Collounssbury, are you sure you haven’t made a premature career change?
See, I’m torn on this issue. While I think most of us agree that Bush per se isn’t a smart or particularly worldly invididual, surely some of his advisors must be? Are Cheney and Rumsfeld really that blind, or blinded by their own arrogance?
I realise America has a huge “Fox News” component that thrives on arrogance and ignorance. But the US has a HUGE population. Statistically, there must be a criticial mass of intelligent and savvy people, and at least some of those must be in influential positions of power.
I can’t believe that America is truly run by people so ignorant or arrogant or unwordly that they don’t have a better grip on world events, and the likely consquences of their action. I think that the true Powers That Be did see this coming, but have a very different agenda to what we have surmised so far. It makes more sense to me that they just lied about expecting low military losses, to encourage more support for war. Military intelligence and analysis just can’t be that bad that they could have truly believed it would have been a walkover.
The BBC News this morning had an interesting discussion concerning expectations for an early victory an the reporter said that both the US and the UK were claiming that it would be short, mass surrenders etc etc in daily background briefings by “senior government sourcs” to the media, leading to overly optimistic media spin in the lead up and early days.
There’s no reason for me to think the culture within this administration cares. From the outset – when Chancellor Schrodder was in the air on the way to meet with the new US president and Bush announced Kyoto could hang – Bush has demonstrated a near total disregard for international diplomacy, and his administration has followed suit.
That incident was followed in quick time by similar with the Japanese PM, by announcing the Mid-East could sort its own problems out … and numerous since.
Also, prior to becoming president, the extent of his personal curiosity about the world extended (afaik) to one trip to Mexico in 50+ years of a very privileged life. He’s an isolationist by inclination and utterly parochial - as well as content, even happy - in his ignorance. YMMV.
Hi, new poster here 
Collounsbury, I would like to ask a few things if possible:
- How much of the Arab media is government owned (including ‘son of the leader and neice of the foreign minister runs X newspaper’ types)?
- How much foreign media is large amount of the Arab public exposed to, if any?
- Do Arabs trust their own media sources, or do they regard these sources as Soviets regarded Pravda?
Thanks