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Post by Aravis on Feb 16, 2005 2:15:43 GMT -5
What I don't get is "or else" what? We are already over-extended, and everybody knows it. In my eyes, our threats are hollow and I can't help but look and Condy and think "What a dumbass."
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Post by Wyndham on Feb 16, 2005 7:08:29 GMT -5
Yes, I agree Aravis. I would guess that's the general perception in N. Korea and Iran. What are you going to do to us? If N. Korea HAS the bomb, and the means to use it, what can you do with them but reach some sort of accommodation? Read one thing recently where the proposal was made the Kim Jung Il be encouraged to declare himself a hereditary king, and be accepted by the international community as such. That would solve one of his problems, and put him in a position in which regime change was unlikely. The population would remain enslaved, but the hope would be that a lawful King might be apt to act with a little more forbearance than a Communist dictator. What can be done about Iran is just as vexing. Can't very well say: granted, we have little if any deployable military force; granted, Iraq is in a very touchy place right now, and any adventures elsewhere in the region would upset the apple cart there; granted that war with Iran would turn the only community in Iraq NOT shooting at us against us. Analysis: situtation exellent. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.
Dumb ass. Good choice of words. Implies, with so much else, 'angy, aggressive, impotence'.
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Post by Wyndham on Feb 16, 2005 9:38:56 GMT -5
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Post by RobertGraves on Feb 19, 2005 15:15:18 GMT -5
There's plenty to feel guilty about:
At least 27 people have been killed and 109 wounded in insurgent attacks in the Iraqi capital Baghdad as Shiites marked their holiest day of Ashura.
Another seven people died in violence outside the city, bringing to nearly 70 the number of people killed in the two-day mourning commemoration.
Nineteen of Saturday's victims were blown apart in a suicide attack carried out by a bomber on a bicycle against a bus carrying pilgrims in Baghdad's Aden Square in which 40 other people were wounded, the official said.
The US military said an American soldier was killed in the blast.
Giving a total for the deaths in the city, home to some 6 million people, the source added: "Nineteen were killed and 40 wounded in a suicide attack on Aden Square. The other victims were - four killed in an attack in Baya, and four in an attack on Al-Nida mosque."
The official, who asked not to be named, added that 109 people were wounded.
In the mainly Shiite district of Baya, a suicide bomber, also on a bicycle, rode into a Sunni funeral tent, killing four and wounding 37, medics said.
A mortar attack close to the Al-Nida mosque in the northern Baghdad Sunni district of Adhamiya also killed four, the government source said.
Two people died in Baquba, north-east of the capital, in an apparent attempt to assassinate an Iraqi general, security sources said, while two Iraqis were killed by a shell in Samarra, and two policemen died from an improvised bomb north of the city.
The Baquba attack was claimed by militants loyal to Iraq's Al Qaeda frontman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in an Internet statement whose authenticity could not be verified.
In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, a Sunni sheikh linked to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish parties, was shot dead.
Near Balad, south of Samarra, the corpses of five soldiers were found overnight riddled with bullet and with their hands tied.
Meanwhile police said Iraqi security forces had arrested Haidar Abu al-Buwari, the alleged commander of an insurgent cell close to Zarqawi in Diyala province, whose capital is Baquba.
"He is one of the mujahedeen princes who works with Zarqawi in the position of cell leader," a police spokesman said.
There were no immediate claims for the Baghdad attacks but Sunni militants had vowed to target the Shiite community, which won a majority of the seats in the new parliament following Iraq's first democratic election in decades.
Horse-trading for the top jobs in a new government has already started, but little appears to have been decided, and choosing a presidential council and a new cabinet could take days if not weeks of wrangling.
Winning parties have promised to involve Sunni Arabs in the assembly's work of drafting a new constitution to avoid fanning the former elite's sense of grievance and boosting support for the insurgents.
Ashura marks the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed and the third imam in Shiite Islam, who was killed in 680 AD during the Battle of Karbala.
Bombings during last year's festival in Karbala and Baghdad killed more than 170 people, the deadliest day since Saddam Hussein's Sunni Arab-dominated regime was ousted in the 2003 invasion.
In the latest hostage crisis, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the mother of one of two Indonesian journalists held captive in Iraq made emotional appeals for their safe release.
The mother of 26-year-old Meutya Hafid said: "I pray to Allah for my daughter to be saved and appeal to the captors to free her. We Muslims are brothers."
The two were abducted during the week and were shown on an Arabic satellite channel by gunmen demanding that Jakarta explain their presence in the country.
In Rome, up to half a million peace demonstrators marched to demand the release of Italian journalist Giulian Sgrena, held hostage in Iraq since February 4.
Scores of hostages have been seized by anti-US insurgents since last April and around 30 of them have been murdered.
-AFP
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Post by Tenarke on Feb 19, 2005 19:43:08 GMT -5
Reading the New York Metro article you brought to us, I wonder whether it is so much a commentary on American Liberals per se, or specifically the New York “intellectual” scene.
It has been over forty years since I lived there and participated in a minor way in that scene. I think that Woody Allen has in some of his comedies given us outlanders a pretty accurate view of what goes on there.
For those of you who have never lived in New York; for a great and cosmopolitan city, it can become very insular. The upper crust New Yorker may have traveled frequently to Rome, Paris or London; but never, darling, to Des Moines. It is well known that the edge of the known world; or at least the world worth knowing, ends some where a few miles west of Yonkers.
It is an interesting paradox that the liberal thinkers of Manhattan are often overly concerned with conformity. What is “in” and what isn’t. Very few in this scene have ever walked a picket line or joined the march in Selma. As liberals, they are mainly theorists and as such orthodoxy is paramount.
If the Iraqi elections are indeed a first step toward liberty and self rule, I must joint in the cheers and I must also reexamine my doubts about the possibility of one country “liberating” another unbidden.
As for Nixon and China; was this due to the statecraft of his administration or simply that China wanted out of an uneasy alliance with the USSR. Russia has traditionally had ambitions for expansion into Asia and both China and Japan have histories of having to repel these in the past.
As for Reagan making peace with the “evil empire”; how much of this was our doing and how much was the fact that the USSR was going broke and could no longer afford their end of the Cold war.
Again I wish the best for a new Iraq; however they still have a way to go. Now they must write a constitution vote to ratify that and then again go to the polls to elect the officers of that new government. I fear that much of what has happened there this past week may be a preamble to civil war between the Sunni’s and the Shi’ia majority.
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Post by RobertGraves on Feb 19, 2005 20:59:54 GMT -5
Very interesting comment, Tenarke.
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Post by Wyndham on Feb 21, 2005 10:21:33 GMT -5
Yes, thank you Tenarke. I haven't been to NY, so the analysis was enlightening. I guess I think I'm with you in general. I hope things work -- if they fail, hundreds of thousands die -- but can't see how they can, in the long run. On the other hand, we don't have NYers up here, and do find it a little disturbing the way people smile when they speak of the latest bad news from Iraq. But I still have difficulty accepting successes -- seeing such great hubis unpunished violates my notion of how the world is put together. I guess time will tell how things work out.
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Post by Tenarke on Feb 21, 2005 16:55:38 GMT -5
Yep! Adjusting one’s “weltanschauung” at dammed near 75 is daunting indeed.
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Post by RobertGraves on Feb 26, 2005 20:56:22 GMT -5
Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten fraudelent research is resulting in: "Anthropology...having to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago." education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1418104,00.html I remember when we were talking about that book by Jean Auel which seemed so prescient in regards to Neandertal and Cro-Magnon interbreeding - well it is no longer releably true.
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Post by Tenarke on Mar 1, 2005 15:53:17 GMT -5
Sometimes my timing is a little off.
We were recently discussing the Republicans crediting Nixon and Reagan for the fall of Communism, and our boy George for the emergence of democracy in the Middle East.
Now with the fall of the pro-Syrian government of Lebanon the neo-cons are claiming another victory for their statecraft.
There is a fallacy in classic logic; “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. (Following the fact, therefore because of the fact.) Just because your wife became pregnant about the time they cancelled your favorite late night TV program; doesn’t mean that the network is the father.
For all their other faults the conservatives do enjoy good timing.
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Post by Wyndham on Mar 1, 2005 16:15:32 GMT -5
Yes I've heard that too. Proof is in the pudding, of course. If Rome wasn't built in a day neither was any functioning democracy. Some Lebanese want the Syrians to go. Which ones (there's lots of flavours)? Why ('so that -- God is Great -- we can more easily slaughter our enemies' doesn't count as proper democratic motive)? and what next (Lebanon has had something called democracy before; alas it looked alot like an authoritarian fascist state)?
Rejoicing at 'building democracy' is something for the historians, a decade in the future, when its actually been done and lasted.
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Post by Aravis on Mar 1, 2005 19:51:57 GMT -5
My grandmother was Lebanese, as it a large part of my family. I can't help but feel that the end of the Syrian occupation and influence is a good thing.
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Post by RobertGraves on Mar 2, 2005 2:49:08 GMT -5
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Post by RobertGraves on Mar 2, 2005 2:50:49 GMT -5
Gunmen have shot dead an Iraqi investigative judge and his son, who were both working for a special tribunal set up to try former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
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Post by Tenarke on Mar 6, 2005 20:04:23 GMT -5
On the other hand Martha Stewart has made it out of the slam and will serve out the rest of her penance doing house arrest in her modest country cottage ($16M). Maureen Dowd seeks to put this into a larger context. www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/opinion/06dowd.html?thGreat tag line!
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