Syria’s occupation helped end the civil war and helped install a new, more or less fully sovereign government. While the Leb government kow tows on certain issues, domestic and foreign affaires are almost 100% the affaire of Hariri et al.
The issue is not remotely similar.
China annexed Tibet right out, no half way, and asserted its inhabitants are part of China. Tibetans, however, see thigns differently, but they do have more or less the same (often theoretical) citizenship rights as Chinese in general. Of course as a suspect minority and as citizens of a dictatorship, it ain’t a sweet deal, but this is not the same thing. Comes closer than your absurd Syria-Leb example, but then I know of almost know one other than Red China apologists who give the PRC a pass on their monstrous policies there.
Yes, they’re called Israeli Arabs by almost everyone.
That’s a mealy mouthed dodge if I ever read one. First, Israel could indeed “cut them loose” or it could cease the policy of annexing land and giving it to her own citizens – were this simply a matter of Israel holding onto territories captured in 1967, the problems would be far less complex, indeed they would be simple. But this little wrinkle of unilateral annexations, and the creeping displacement of Palestinians rather suggests something more sinister: ethnic cleansing drip by drip. Slow motion. There are no other explanations for building large subsidized settlements in the occupied territories.
This may come as a shock, but there is a universe outside of GD. Occasionally, I even participate in it. GD competes for my time with all sorts of other things, like my job, friends, family, real-life political activity, musical activity, and yes, even my cat.
Seriously, I fail to see how #2 contradicts #1. Perhaps you perceive that I criticize Israeli government actions in GD more often than Palestinian actions (and perhaps this isn’t just a perception) because people in GD rarely post anything as outrageous about Palestinians here as you do about Israeli government actions. If someone posted “Yasser Arafat has no problem with Israeli settlers; in fact, he makes housecalls on Shabbat and at weddings to bring them bunches of pink carnations as a token of respect,” you can bet I’d call him/her on it. So far I haven’t seen anyone in GD allege that the Palestinian Authority is either a human rights or an economic paradise.
But when you post that there is nothing remotely resembling a state of war in the West Bank and Gaza, yes, I have a problem with it and am not shy about saying so.
One huge similarity between the Central American conflicts and the Palestinian situation is that thousands upon thousands of civilians have been caught in the middle. I don’t pretend that my bitching on a message board will change Israeli government policy, but yes, I’d say the Palestinians sure need somebody’s help. I focus on Israel’s misdeeds because I would like to be able to expect better of them. It’s entirely possible that I have relatives there (although I’m not specifically aware of any), and I’d like to think my family has some fucking morals, or at least enough to refrain from bulldozing the homes and destroying the livelihood of innocent noncombatants. Or do you believe that every Palestinian is a potential combatant, even the 80-year-old grandmothers?
And even if that is the case, well, this may sound callous, but the Israeli government has made their bed, and now they’re lying in it. I’m just sorry for any Israeli or Palestinian who is not part of the problem, but has to live with the consequences.
If Israel were treating Palestinian terrorism as a civil crime, they would arrest and try all alleged terrorists in a court of law. I do believe the Israeli legal system, like all democracies, has provisions for things like competent defense counsel, evidence, testimony, and a chain of appeals before imposing punishment. That ain’t happening with any degree of regularity. (Are you ever going to address my point about collective punishment, by the way?)
Well bully for them. Are you seriously expecting me to congratulate them? And are you telling me that an adjudication of guilt or innocence was made regarding every single victim of Jenin? If you want to be taken seriously as a democracy, you have to behave that way toward ALL people under your jurisdiciton.
And believe me, I have been just as vocal about Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. I wasn’t around on the SDMB for Yugoslavia, and barely for Afghanistan. Just because you don’t see my opinions in GD doesn’t mean that I don’t have them, or am not taking action on them.
Post #1 says you “criticize any state or nongovernmental actor that routinely violates international law and the human rights.” Post #2 says you only criticize some of them: “Given my limited time available to devote to any given GD thread, I try to address issues where I feel there is a POV or fact missing from the original debate, or where I otherwise have something to add.”
On which side? Did you criticize the atrocities committed by Slobodan Milesovic or or did you criticize Clinton’s military efforts, which ended those atrocities? In Afghanistan, did you criticize the atrocities and degradation of women under the Taliban? Or did you criticize the America-led effort, which replacee the Taliban with a far better government?
I have a sense that you tend to criticize the United States and Israel more than other countries.
Very pedantic. If I say “I condemn all murder” that does not mean that I will dedicate myself to finding and commenting on every case of murder that occurs.
Again, december, what is your point. I fail to see how “I have a sense that you tend to criticize the United States and Israel more than other countries.” is anything other than an ad hominem designed to discredit Eva Luna. This line of arguementation pretty clearly is about the poster, not the post. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that is a violation of the forum rules. It doesn’t matter if you believe Eva Luna is a raging anti-semitic bigot, either address her points or take it to the pit or just ignore them entirely. Calling into question her character is off-topic and against the rules of this forum.
Please see my aforementioned point about The Existence of Life Outside GD, as well as my other previous points. I criticize other human rights violators in forums other than GD. In addition, all human rights violations are not equal in scope, magnitude, or the degree to which they are already being addressed by others, both in GD and in real life. I am also more knowledgeable about some situations (Chechnya, for example) than others (Sri Lanka, for example). Therefore, like most of us, I engage in a certain amount of triage.
All of the above, although to widely varying degrees depending on the specifics of each situation. I have to say that I had many fewer misgivings about military intervention in Yugoslavia than I was about military intervention in Afghanistan, for a wide variety of reasons which are too complex to debate in detail in this thread (as we have already gone quite astray from Mr. DeLay and his own myriad issues). Mainly, it was pretty clear that hundreds of thousands of people were being massacred, tortured, and displaced, and that the situation was in danger of spinning even farther out of control if something drastic wasn’t being done quickly. Afghanistan, while in an awful state of disarray and subjugation, was not in such a state at the time of the U.S. military intervention, which wasn’t ostensibly for the purpose of overthrowing the Taliban anyway. I also believe that the Clinton Administration’s reasons for going into Yugoslavia were what they said they were, which isn’t the case with Afghanistan. During the early 1990s, I was employed at Immigration Court; one of my jobs was to review all political asylum applications for completeness and ensure that advisory opinions were obtained from the State Department before the hearings on the merits, and another one of my jobs (which I volunteered for, BTW) was to abstract and keep a library of articles on human rights conditions around the world for the use of the Chicago judges. I also served as court clerk for deportation proceedings held in detention, so I witnessed quite a bit of testimony in asylum proceedings. So I’ve been exposed to quite a bit of rather graphic testimony about both the Yugoslav and Afghan situations.
And it certainly remains to be seen whether Afghanistan will be better or worse off because of American military intervention. But that point has certainly been debated on the SDMB; I don’t see the point in rehashing it right this minute.
I haven’t performed a statistical study of my own posts, so I can’t say whether that’s factually accurate. But for what seems like the zillionth time, no, I don’t pay equal attention to every single goddamned post on this board. There are tons of threads that I never open at all, even ones on issues that interest me, because I have a life. We all have our own hot-button issues, and most of us have limited time to goof around on the SDMB, and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend otherwise. In an analogous vein, it is disingenuous of you to make thinly veiled allegations that I am a hypocrite because I don’t clock the time I spend criticizing the U.S. and Israel, and then spend equal time criticizing the Palestinian Authority and, say, Burkina Faso. At this point, I really don’t care whether you think I am a hypocrite; I think those who are paying attention to the facts can see otherwise.
As for your perceptions about my allegedly disproportionate criticism of the U.S. and Israel, please read my several previous responses in this thread. Other than that, my retyping seems to serve no purpose in changing your perceptions, which seem to be unswayed by repeated application of reasoning.
Oh and **december, ** you are going to be in for a looooong battle if you decide to engage in hair-splitting with someone who splits hairs for a living, or in a pissing match on issues of treatment of refugees with someone who has spent a large part of her career working with refugees and has many friends who still work with refugees. This thread nearly has me pissed off enough to call up my ex-boyfriend, the clinical social worker, the one who ran a program for the treatment of survivors of torture, and see if I can get him to join in. He’s Jewish, too, but I’m sure he could offer some valuable perspectives on treatment of Afghans, Palestinians, and Yugoslavs.
I’m seriously beginning to wonder if your posts are part of a conservative plot to suck all my time away from actual, real-life political action.
I find this comment amazing. Things are far from perfect now, but before we took action the UN was forecasting that hundreds of thousands of Afghan people would starve in the coming winter. We averted the mass starvation with our rapid victory, which permitted adequate food relief. I don’t have to remind you of the status of women under the Taliban, the ongoing civil war, the poverty, the lack of rights, the atrocities…
Bloody amazing, december. Is this your plan, to ignore the substance of essentially everything I say and continue to hijack the thread into an Afghan war of attrition?
A hint in re: Afghanistan: I think in the long term, i.e. longer than the next coming winter. Remember when the U.S. thought it was a good idea to back the Afghan resistance, back in the '80s? How did that all turn out? Remind me, will you? I was 12 years old in 1980, so my memory is a little fuzzy. What-ifs are always dangerous, but who knows how differently the past 20 years might have gone for Afghanistan if the U.S. had given a damn for them then, other than as a Cold War proxy battle?
But if you want to discuss Afghanistan further, start another thread. Your so-called empathy toward the Afghan people isn’t terribly convincing to me. Or better yet, if you think I’m such a hypocrite, why don’t you go ahead and Pit me, and see how much sympathy you get?
(P.S. I find this “we” business in your posts about U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan to be more than a little ridiculous, as I doubt you are out there carrying a gun.)
So Eva… Just when are we allowed to pass judgement on the success of the Afghan war? December is quite correct that SO FAR, it is undisputable that Afghanistan is better off for having been invaded. Is there really any serious question about that?
So how long? Do you get to wring your hands and worry about the results of the war for five years? Ten years? Twenty?
And let’s say that the place stays unstable, and living conditions deteriorate five years down the road. For you to claim that as evidence that the war ‘failed’, you have to not only show that conditions are bad, but that they would have been better had the Taliban stayed in power.
Given that standard, I am quite willing to say that the war in Afghanistan was a success for America, for the Afghan people, and for the world. Period. We’ve already had a good long period of time to observe the aftermath. The place is FAR better off than it would have been under the Taliban - especially for women and children who took the brunt of their particular form of evil.
In the future the place may devolve into chaos. But then, it might have done so under the Taliban, as well.
It turned out pretty darned well, when viewed as a part of the cold war. The defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan was a key element in helping the West win the Cold War while avoiding a disastrous nuclear war. As a result, one billion people were freed, the world was not destroyed, and the threat of totalitarianism was lifted from the US and Europe.
This marvelous success was due to effective actions by every President from Truman through Reagan, especially those two. You were a lucky young lady that these two men were elected President. With different leadership, the world might have been destroyed or much of western civilization might have been permanently taken over by a brutal dictatorship.
Your point about Afghanistan being a hijack is valid. We seem to have abandoned the original point of the thread, which is that IMHO the Democrats have no foreign policy alternative to offer. Or, at least, they’re not offering an alternative vision of foreign policy. If any poster disagrees, I invite you to tell us what the Democratic vision is.
…as long as you ignore leaving a power vacuum for the Taliban to fill, pissing off the Afghani people at our desertion of them, and giving rise to some nutjob named Osama bin Laden, sure. :rolleyes:
Perhaps you have not been paying attention or perhaps your “sources” have not, however we have seen what?
Rebound in lawlessness, the city state of Kaboul has some degree of liberalism but that doesn’t hold in the rest of the country, and poppy productino has gone back through the roof. Plus the Taleban are making a resurgence as conditions are widely reported to be declining, ex the Herat region which is its own little state, towards exately those that set the stage for Taleban I.
And the fabulous much promised super duper rebuilding of the country never happened.
Nope, the war is not a success for America as of yet, except in some myopic quarter results driven bullshit sense.
I find your professional dodging of points you can not respond to, and consistent gross distortions, to the point of fundamental dishonesty to be amazing, personally.
Let’s take the following:
Again, for those of us who live in the normal, real world, what the UN did was warn that without action there could be starvation in Afghanistan.
Warning that something could happen, given a set of circumstances, and moving to mobilize resources to prevent that, is not the same as predicting something would/will happen, except in a fun house mirror world with no regard for truth or rational analysis or even some semblance of logic.
Much the same as warning there could be hijackings of airliners if steps are not taken etc. is not the same as ** predicting** the same will happen.
However, this gross distortion is useful for december’s little ideologically driven smear campaign against the UN and humanitarian organizations.
I will say again that IMHO this is incorrect. First, it is important to remember than we are 15 months before a general election and that the candidates can’t expect to have every aspect of foreign policy nailed down. Second, in my minutes of web searching, I was able to pull up pages and pages of issue speeches by the candidates on foreign policy.
Of the six candidates’ home pages I visited, only these two had pages entitled “Foreign Policy,” which makes for handy linking. All of the candidates’ pages had areas considered foreign policy. Kucinich had 5 or 6 pages which could have been linked; the others had foreign policy divided between “Homeland Security” and “Department of Peace” and other issues. Themes which seem to come up are increased international cooperation, more focus on first responders in the war on terrorism, conformation to international treaties, increased focus on rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, and movement towards energy independence and less dependency on foreign oil.
Do these compromise cohesive foreign policies for you?
My point was that the most recent U.S. military intervention into Afghanistan should not be evaluated in a political, ideological, and/or historical vacuum. We aren’t exactly talking about a tabula rasa here; if past U.S. policy toward Afghanistan had been different, and we hadn’t used the Afghan people as geopolitical footballs, the country might not be the screwed-up place it has been until now. Just a thought: maybe foreign policy planners might take into consideration what is in the best interests of the nation they are dealing with before screwing around with the destiny of an entire country encompassing several peoples, the history and internal conflicts of which they have only the barest understanding. Call it naïve fantasy if you want, but if it weren’t for the occasional naïve foreign policy fantasy, I might have self-immolated on the steps of the White House by now out of sheer frustration.
(Oh, and december, I find your comments about my being a “lucky young lady” to be left with the foreign policy results of the Truman through Reagan Administrations to be more than a little condescending. As someone with an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies and the various professional and life experiences that tend to go together with that, I think I have a pretty decent grip on the Cold War, and from some viewpoints I doubt you’ve seen (such as that of my ex-boyfriend, who fought in Spetsnaz in Afghanistan, but deeply regrets the whole thing now). Much greater historians than you have written zillions of entire books on the various angles and what-ifs of the Cold War, so I think it’s a wee bit flippant to dismiss all other causes than the outcome of Third World proxy battles for the failure of the Soviet system.)
This will be my last comment on Afghanistan in this poor multiply hijacked thread; if anyone wants to revisit Afghanistan, unless it’s in the context of Democratic, Republican, or Tom DeLay’s views on U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan, I recommend starting another thread.
Well, at least until shit like this stops happening.
Yep, as long as this kind of shit happens I’m going to “wring my hands” and bitch at the people who should be doing something about it. If that’s ok with you of course.
(I know, I said I wouldn’t post any more about Afghanistan in this thread, but I couldn’t resist. I hate to see the party go on without me. It was just getting demoralizing to beat my head against the virtual wall, plus I’ve been a bit under the weather and just don’t have the stamina today for long bitch-fests.)
Actually my first “OH!” had a link to an article about that report by the Human Rights Watch organization. It also had this lovely bit in it
I guess “Afghanistan is better off” because dying from 30 rounds to the chest is better than dying from however it was the Taleban used to kill people.
