Arafat's HQ falls

And yet the Israelis are still giving assurances that Arafat won't be harmed.
How many times must he have innocents killed before Israel is allowed by the international community (the United States) to turn Arafat to dust? He's a terrorist, always has been, always will be.

Arafat is seemingly incapable of compromise. He turns down generous deals just because they don't meet EVERY demand. Things are only getting worse, and its not too hard to see him as a reason. He's got to go.

This is THE endgame. Arafat falls and all hell breaks lose.

There is no stopping any of this over there. Both sides are headed straight to war.

This is the new world.

I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about, but it doesn't really matter - the whole US seems to side with you after seeing those 3 Palestinian individuals dance in the street on t.v. after Sept 11.

The world is not so fucking simple.

Arafat just went nuts, yelling at the CNN reporter asking him about his current situation. The reporter isn't being the most tactful person on earth (she's practically interrogating an Israeli official at the moment) but outbursts like that can't help his image.

[quote]bigblacK:
I thought the son of a bitch was a cold blooded murderer long before 9/11.
I think it may be you that might not have the best grasp on who Arafat really is.
And sometimes the world can be VERY fucking simple, my friend. Arafat is a terrorist who should have been killed by the Mossad 20 years ago. Instead we have a cancer on the region who has stoked the fires of war once more. All in an effort to increase his own personal power. He's a killer who deserves death.

uh oh. Look for piss to be on the wailing wall tomorrow.

Agree. The discussion is no longer if it can be prevented from exploding, but rather who the combatants will be.
Will it be contained to the Israeli's and the Palestinians, or will some other Arab nations join the battle?
Will the U.S. say "screw foreign oil dependance" and back the Israeli's 100% or will we try to play the middle?

Bush will always back Israel, but I think the middle ground, in this case, is the place to stay. I think the last thing anyone wants, even the War Hawks, is to get embroiled in an Israeli/Palestinian war. I don't know that Arafat needs to die necessarily, but they need someone else in his position. He's cracking up, and he was frankly never that sane in the first place.

We had a really interesting discussion in history class about american foreign policy throughout time. I was really surprised that I was the only person in my class of 10 people who thought that GWB should get out of the business of other countries. I dont think he,or the united states,have any right to do what they are doing in Israel. They arent getting anything accomplished there by trying to intervene as they have. The USA needs to pull out of there and let shit happen. Its obvious that both the Israelis and the Palestinians dont want peace. That was not the only thing that was discussed. We also talked about the Korean War,and Vietnam, Bosnia... all those places and wars. In my opinion, and this may just be me... I think that the president has no right to go screwing around in any country he likes. I dont think GWB has any real right to go and completely change a country, like he did in Afganistan. Yes, the September 11th event was a tragedy... I know that. But he still shouldnt have to go tearing through a country killing a lot of people, just because of what one man planned. I think that the USA needs to stick with its own business. Ok, let the insults start. Im prepared to have my ass chewed out by every GW Bush supporter here, as well as every patriotic person here.

Nope, your ass will be chewed out by a man named Bubba in prison 15 years from now. But I'm more concerned with what you said in your post. Now I'm not exactly much of a Bush supporter, or even a patriotic Canadian, but I think one of the major problems of the world is a lack of intervention by the first world and oftentimes when we do intervene it's in the wrong places. Take Vietnam for example, the war should have ended in 1946 (The war was pretty much fought in some form or another from 1945 to 1975) when Ho Chi Minh offered a generous deal to the Americans if they could get the French out. Meanwhile Harry Truman said that all peoples should have a right to self-determination, so much for that. Now flash forward a few years and you've got yourself a North and South Vietnam. Now what happens? An evil dictator propped up by the US ruling the South and an oppressive, though far better than the South's government, regime in the North. Now this could have ended in 1946, with Vietnam as a communist country, however also an American ally, if the Americans hadn't supported and largely paid for the French attempt to reconquer Vietnam. Think about it, had that offer been accepted millions of lives probably would have been spared and Vietnam would have been, to quote Uncle Ho himself, "a fertile field for American capital and enterprise." Wouldn't that be nice?

Now this doesn't just apply to the US, far from it actually. The Rwandan genocide resulted in the loss of roughly 800 000 lives and there was hardly a whisper of protest from the first world. In fact, the Belgian paratrooper battalion that was stationed there withdrew when a few of its members were killed. After that, there were two Canadian officers who disobeyed orders and refused to leave commanding a small force of African troops trying to stop genocide from occuring. They did their best and probably saved thousands of lives and the Canadian commander (Romeo Dallaire) is one of my personal heroes. But how much trouble would this have been to stop? Not too much by my estimate. The UN cut his forces from 3000 to 500 after he requested a boost to 5000 and then refused to call the genocide a "genocide".

So what the fuck is wrong with us? We've gone in to countries and completely fucked everything up and then had the power to stop things from becoming completely fucked up and done nothing. So what should we do? Take a look at ourselves, by that I mean the first world. We should try to make peace, set up stable governments in countries, give more aid, broker peace deals between warring nations. We've got our problems here, but for the most part, they're pretty insignificant when you compare them to someone on the streets in Africa. We should be involved in the rest of the world. Isolationism doesn't work. We should just be involved for the side of good in the world and not money and empire building. We've got plenty as it is and the amount of waste in North America alone is astounding. Take for example the fact that there would be 3600 calories for everyone just from grain if it weren't fed to farm animals. As Harry Tuttle said "We're all in this together", so let's start acting that way.

[quote]raoul duke:
[QB] I've heard about those Canadian as well. They really are heroes. If you wanna read a great book on the genocide look for this:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312243359/ref=pd_bxgy_text_2/103-6055022-1376666" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312243359/ref=pd_bxgy_text_2/103-6055022-1376666</a>

I agree that the advanced nations of the world cannot just sit back and let other nations tear each other to shreds all the time. In this world there is no such thing as isolationism. We have not just national secrity interests world-wide, but a moral responsibility to use our force for good. Somalia was a perfect example. We had a great idea of what we wanted to accomplish, but the actual excution of the mission was deeply flawed.
I'm ashamed to this day of the United States unwillingness to step in in Somalia. We could have prevented MILLIONS of deaths, but instead sat on our hands.
As for the middle east......we have strategic interests in that region, like it or not. We have a responsibility to our friend Israel. They are the only democratic nation in the region, and as such deserve our suport and aid.

The problem is DJ that originally Bush DID want to keep out of the Middle East. But then he realized that no other Arab nation would help us at all if we didn't step in to help stop the bloodshed.

Plus, I don't know where yu fall on the political spectrum, but Bill Clinton imposed his endless and ultimately pointless peace policies on the Middle East for his entire presidency. This is hardly just a Bush thing.

We are the biggest, strongest military in the world. We are the symbol of freedom for the world. If we don't step in to help, then who will? No one else has seemed very eager to actually do what it takes to get thr job done. The decision to pull out of Somalia was a cowardly and shameful insult to all the brave men who died there, a knee-jerk reaction by scared politicians.

But really, some will always see it as "helping" and some will see it as "interfering". In this world climate, we simply can't sit back and ignore atrocities, suffering, and death. If you really think that the Taliban was a legitimate government that, with its human rights violations, deserved to be left alone, then I can't help you.

We are the leading nation in the world period. That comes with a heavy amount of responsiblity. A responsiblity we cannot just say "oh well" to and then not get involved with things.

Know that if we do not back up Israel there will be genocide in the region and it will befall the Jews. Make no mistake about words of "peace" from any Arab nation in that region for they would kill every single Jew they could. They would ground Israel into dust. See that one thread in Culture that speaks of what the governments feed their people over there. Jews are cannibals and such they pronouce. Great. Ishmael is still jealous of Issac's inhearitance to this very day. And the ancestors will stop at nothing to get it.

I think Isaerl would win. They's pretty badass when it comes to the military. But ther rest of the world would pussyfoot around and talk about how callous it is and someone would have to break it up. Like a fight in the cafeteria, there's always the little wuss who has top break them up.

Israel's had 5 official wars since 1948 against almost every Arab nation, and won them all. Technologically and strategically, Israel has the second strongest military in the world. The Arabs won't have the opportunity to commit genocide, but there's no doubt that they would if they could. And if it does come down to a war, which undoubtedly it will, Israel doesn't need America to bail them out.

Which is less than I can say for the Arab countries supposedly supporting the Palestinians. Even if they do help them fight the war, remember that even after the 50+ years of conflict between Palestinians and Jews since statehood, and the countless years before that, the surrounding Arab countries have done nothing to house, feed, or otherwise help their Arab brothers. The Palestinians complain so much about having to endure what they have to endure BECAUSE OF THE JEWS, when even their own allies leave them starving in the dust.

Israel may not need us against the Arab states but unfortunately the issue has grown farther then the Middle East and America will need to support them. Already China and Russia have been rumbling from within, not to mention several European countries, about the Israelie state and they look more and more to become what the US is to Israel as to the Arabs.

Let me also mention that (yes this is Political forum) many of what is happeneing at this moment is curiously mentioned as things to come in the book of Revealations in the Bible. Interesting indeed. The world against Israel and israel winning.....sounds almost probable at the moment....them with the lovely mini nukes that explode over 500 yards or feet if i recall correctly.

Whether prophecy or not some incredible things will began to happen in that region and there is a reason why the Mideast garners soooo much attention for being a relatively small plot of land.

what do you mean by China and Russia grumbling. I haven't really heard much to that effect.

Oh, and I just really don't think there's ANY civilized, developed country, Russia, China, or anyone else, that's willing to take on a war with the U.S. on the other side. It's the crazy would-be suicide bombers/martyr-wannabes who challenge the U.S., because they don't care about their life, and they care more about destroying what they hate than embracing and developing what they love. Besides, at this point, Russia's nowhere near ready to take on any powerful enemy, much less the most powerful nation in the world. As for China, even though I really hadn't heard anything about their support for the Arabs in this conflict, they just aren't willing to take on America. This isn't going to turn into WWIII.

Unfortunately as we have seen you do not need to be a country to wreck havoc on the US of A. There is a growing sentiment among the nations of the world that we are just bullies trying to vie our way into any situation and arguement we can. And they resent that. In the UN we have had our difficulties with other member nations as well. To support this read <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000023309apr01.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Dop inions" target="_blank">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000023309apr01.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Dop inions</a>
an article by Mark Bowden who worte Black Hawk Down.

Our support of Israel makes us enemy in the eyes of any Arab nation. Add to the fact that they actively fund and house and train terrorists that are used against our homeland you have the beginnings of a greater problem. China, unfortunately, is not a friend. They do not have to be militairly superior to us nor even close because their sheer weight in numbers could crush us. They could easily create an army the size of our whole population without breaking a sweat. They perhaps cannot fund that army nor arm it yet they would immediately have their backers, discretly of course. Lots of ifs and maybes and realities that have yet to see the light but its possible. Russia is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. So is India and Pakistan.

But this attitude that America cannot be brought done is ridiculous. Sure it is highly improbable and very unlikely yet if we were to be stretched to thin in too many areas even the mightiest could fall. Not to mention that terrorism itself, a single act even, managed to damage this country in such a highly impactful way. Time will tell.

Main thing is, is that we must support Israel. Especially in the face of all our calls for other nations to fight terrorism and Israel rising to that call. But no matter what I will tell you right now Israel will never fall to enemy hands without incredible odds stacked against it. Even then probably not.

You really think China hates us or our support of Israel enough right now to go to war against us?

And that is something we should never forget.

China can easily see us supporting Israel as we supporting governmental terrorism and use that as an excuse to go against us. So many things and things I hope never happen but they still want to be number one and not just in population.

<a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/printmc20020405.shtml" target="_blank">http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/printmc20020405.shtml</a>

Mona Charen
April 5, 2002

A sickening respect

Is there a certain respect for suicide murderers abroad in the land? One knows, of course, that these killers are the toast of the Arab world. Saddam Hussein, for one, donates $25,000 each to the families of the mass murderers (how he can spare it when laboring under U.N. sanctions is another matter for another day), and the entire Arab press lauds and praises their "martyrdom." But that's not what I'm thinking of. No, it's those here, who purport to shed light on the conflict by noting that suicide bombers are acting out of "desperation" after so little progress on ending the "occupation." For the millionth time, 98 percent of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo accord. (Israel was promised peace in exchange.) Yasser Arafat started this war after Ehud Barak offered him a state on 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected it because he has in mind the map children study in Palestinian schools -- the one that shows "Palestine" filling the entire region called Israel. His goals have not changed since he founded the PLO in 1964, before Israel owned an inch of the West Bank and Gaza -- territories Israel seized only because she was attacked by five Arab armies in 1967.

C-SPAN recently asked the question on a call-in show, "What would you do for a cause?" stressing the suicide, but not the murder, inherent in suicide bombings. Some phoned in to say that they would certainly blow themselves up for a cause (whether they would take innocent teen-agers and babies with them in the process was never probed).

Cable TV channels have provided round-the-clock coverage of Arafat's comfort. Does he have batteries for his cell phone? Is he cramped in only two rooms? This murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and Arabs on his hands is treated by some in the media, and most of the "world community," as Albert Schweitzer in a kaffiyeh. Even President Bush warns the Israelis not to touch him. (The Arab blood Arafat has spilled includes anyone agitating for democracy, anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel, Jordanians who stood in his way in 1970 and Lebanese who stood in his way in 1982. Only a couple of months ago, he pulled a pistol on one of his cabinet members. He is, as he always was, a brutal terrorist -- the complete moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, there is no act bin Laden has performed that was not cheered excitedly by Arafat's hate-imbued people.)

Our TV instructors have seldom shown the Ramallah kindergartners dressed as suicide murderers, nor the Palestinian ambulances carrying Kalishnikovs. They displayed the contents of the Karine A -- once. Oh, and the small gaggle of European and American leftists and anti-globalization fanatics who arrived to show solidarity with the encircled Arafat were called "international peace activists" by NPR and other news organizations. Funny, their interest in peace was missing when Israelis were being blown up in discos, cafes and supermarkets. Only The Washington Post mentioned that their leader bombed a McDonald's in France.

Still, with numbing obduracy, The New York Times, NPR, the European Union and even, alas, on bad days the Bush administration continue to treat the terror inflicted on Israel as qualitatively different from that visited upon us. And officials, as if floating down from some other planet unsullied by knowledge of the headlines of the last 18 months, state mindlessly that Israel and the Palestinians "must get back to negotiations."

For years now, it has been clear that the issue between Israel and her neighbors is not occupation, it is not settlements, and it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to live peacefully with others. There are 22 Arab nations spanning thousands of square miles -- many of them rich in oil. But they cannot abide one tiny Jewish country in their midst. Saudi Arabia would not even permit the president of the United States to observe Christmas on its territory (George H.W. Bush did so on an American ship offshore).

Israel was bullied and cajoled into offering everything that reasonable Western diplomats thought the Arabs needed to make peace. Israel got war instead. Only a lunatic would now argue that Israel needs further "negotiations" with the murderers who are blowing up her citizens.

Is there a way out of this 'war'?

By*RICK SALUTIN
****

Friday, April 5, 2002

Has this been a "war"? I don't think words matter much compared to lives, but they matter if they obstruct understanding and solutions. It is clearly not a war like others Israel has fought. The Palestinians have no artillery, tanks or air force. They have police and -- largely Islamic -- paramilitaries. The latter were built up by Israel in the 1980s to offset secular forces; the former were allowed under the Oslo accords, largely to control the latter. I say this not to be academic but to point out that debates over history here are endlessly complex and irresoluble. Who's to blame and who started it will never be settled.

This war with just one army is being fought almost entirely against cities and refugee camps. The Observer describes "the devastation" that Israeli tanks have made in Ramallah. "Roads have been dynamited or torn up. Buildings are burnt and shattered. Everywhere there is rubble." Water and electricity are cut off; people put on curfew with snipers stationed to stop them from going out to shop, get medicine, use outhouses or collect the dead. Soldiers break into homes, then smash through walls to the next. Hundreds of men are rounded up by age groups. The press is banned or shot.

There is no doubt that suicide bombings in Israeli cities are terror. But why is this "war" not terror, too? Everyone's definition of terror amounts to: use of violence against civilians for political ends. The Bush doctrine says states can support terror, and use it against their own or other populations. Israel's right-wing parties, whose successors now hold power, were proudly terrorist; two of their leaders were prime ministers. Terror isn't even necessarily indefensible. The use of atom bombs against Japanese cities fits the definition but has always been defended.

Backers of Israel deny any "moral equivalence" regarding terror because suicide bombers deliberately target civilians while Israel targets terrorists. Civilian casualties are, they say, collateral damage. But they are just as inevitable since, as an Israeli spokesman said, the only way to find terrorists is to go house to house. An Israeli officer told his commanders to study the lessons, "however shocking it may sound," of the German attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. Enough said?

The choice of word matters because it helps clarify why this "war of terror" will fail. (As I said, laying blame is irrelevant; only stopping the carnage counts). I'm not even arguing terror can't ever work -- at times, it might -- but here it is counterproductive on both sides. For any terrorists Israeli soldiers find as they break into homes, then smash through to next door, they leave children looking on at destruction, humiliation and worse, and create new terrorist generations to replace those caught. Not only in Palestine but throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, which now have their own networks to watch and are not dependent on CNN as they were in the gulf war. "We want to blow up embassies if Arafat becomes a martyr. We want to hijack planes if Arafat becomes a martyr," chanted hundreds in a Lebanese refugee camp. This campaign is sowing, not uprooting, terror. Any official who says the opposite is stupid or lying.

Let me contextualize Yasser Arafat's role. I have no idea what games he has played and if he encouraged the bombers. But the notion that he exerts total control over young people willing to die is ludicrous. This is not just some kids bumrushing the mall on a dull day. No leader, and certainly not a neutered one, can create so desperate a commitment. If you want to destroy it, you must destroy the conditions that engender it.

It seems to me many people who wish Israel well get stymied at this point. They see that terror begets terror but feel Israel has no choice since Palestinians are not open to peace, as shown by their rejection of the "very generous" Israeli offer at Camp David II. Without going into detail, let me say I think this is a misreading. Israel's offer involved no control over borders, a disruptive set of military roads and illegal settlements. It would not have created what Tony Blair calls a viable state. The Palestinians say they did not reject further talks and made subsequent progress at Taba. I say this not to make debate points but to suggest there is more hope for a deal than some now see.

What would make such a shift possible? Something quite simple: to de-demonize and rehumanize the other side. Israeli military refusenik Assaf Oron, in an "open letter to American Jews," says: "I believe that the Palestinians are human beings like us. What a concept, eh?" This means assuming that most people on both sides want peace, will compromise and will respond to a decent offer, because they would rather live than die. That would not solve everything, but it would leave the haters and killers on each side increasingly isolated. Do you have a better idea?[/b]

[www.globeandmail.com]

If WWIII goes really really bad for the US (which I don't see happening) we'll just use our "get out of jail free card" and nuke whoever we're losing too. Can't make war with us if your country is a smokin' crater.