Who are this fools advisers and speech writers? Couldn't they have found a less sensitive example than Israel? What do you think? All comments are welcome.
Israel model for Iraq, says Bush US President George W Bush has appealed for people to give his strategy in Iraq a chance - holding up Israel as a model for defining success there. He said America would like to see Iraq function as a democracy while dealing with violence - just as Israel does. Speaking at the US Naval War College, Mr Bush said success in Iraq would not be defined by an end to attacks. His remarks come as members of his Republican party are increasingly turning against the war in Iraq. The US president characterised the war in Iraq as primarily against al-Qaeda forces and their use of "headline-grabbing" suicide attacks and car bombings. He said: "Our success in Iraq must not be measured by the enemy's ability to get a car bombing in the evening news." The terms of success set out by Mr Bush included "the rise of a government that can protect its people, deliver basic services for all its citizens and function as a democracy even amid violence". Mr Bush suggested Israel as a standard to work towards. "In places like Israel, terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. "The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq." 'Well-conceived plan' In December US President George W Bush announced the deployment of a total of 21,500 extra troops in Iraq. In early March Defence Secretary Robert Gates approved a request for an extra 2,200 military police to support the security drive in Baghdad. Mr Bush asked officials and the public for patience to allow his strategy to work, thus giving Iraq's leaders time to achieve political reconciliation. "It's a well-conceived plan by smart military people. And we owe them the time, and we owe them the support they need to succeed," he said.
1) Which is the only country in the world to have dropped bombs on over twenty different countries since 1945?
2) Which is the only country to have used nuclear weapons?
3) Which country was responsible for a car bomb which killed 80 civilians in Beirut in 1985, in a botched assassination attempt, thereby making it the most lethal terrorist bombing in modern Middle East history?
4) Which country's illegal bombing of Libya in 1986 was described by the UN Legal Committee as a "classic case" of terrorism?
5) Which country rejected the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to terminate its "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua in 1986, and then vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law?
6) Which country was accused by a UN-sponsored truth commission of providing "direct and indirect support" for "acts of genocide" against the Mayan Indians in Guatemala during the 1980s?
7) Which country unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in December 2001?
8) Which country renounced the efforts to negotiate a verification process for the Biological Weapons Convention and brought an international conference on the matter to a halt in July 2001?
9) Which country prevented the United Nations from curbing the gun trade at a small arms conference in July 2001?
10) Aside from Somalia, which is the only other country in the world to have refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?
11) Which is the only Western country which allows the death penalty to be applied to children?
12) Which is the only G7 country to have refused to sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, forbidding the use of landmines?
13) Which is the only G7 country to have voted against the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998?
14) Which was the only other country to join with Israel in opposing a 1987 General Assembly resolution condemning international terrorism?
15) Which country refuses to fully pay its debts to the United Nations yet reserves its right to veto United Nations resolutions?
Answer to all 15 questions: The USA So, who are the terrorists?
What Model Should Iraq Follow? CFR Outlines South Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, and Lebanon
Even as they disagree on how long American forces will remain in Iraq, U.S. officials and foreign policy experts suggest a number of scenarios for what Iraq might resemble after coalition forces eventually pull out. President Bush has proposed the so-called South Korean model, a long-term residual troop presence to prevent civil war from breaking out. Many have also likened the conflict to Vietnam, where the fall of Saigon did not unleash the massive “domino” effect many predicted. Others have offered Lebanon, which suffered from a long civil war before an uneasy truce was inked, as a more accurate template. Then there are those who say Iraq should become a federalized state, akin to post-1995 Bosnia. Experts disagree over the degree to which the conflict in Iraq could spread to neighboring countries.
The South Korea Model
Over fifty years after the Korean War, some thirty thousand U.S. troops remain stationed along the DMZ, which divides the peninsula between North Korea and South Korea (the number is expected to diminish to 24,500 next year). The U.S. forces are there to keep an uneasy peace between the two Koreas and prevent war from erupting again. The analogy to Korea is meant to portray the Iraq conflict as a long-term one that requires a residual “over-the-horizon” military presence, mainly to support indigenous forces and keep the peace. “The idea is more a model of a mutually-agreed arrangement, whereby we have a long and enduring presence, but one that is by consent of both parties and under certain conditions,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters in early June. He also said the Korean model stood in contrast to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, where “we just left lock, stock and barrel.”
Still, some opponents of the war, including several presidential aspirants, have seized on this comparison as a justification for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely. This CFR.org issue tracker examines the positions of current 2008 candidates. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, for instance, has called for “zero troops,” including residual forces, as well as for a withdrawal of embassy staff if the security situation worsens.
Others say Korea is a faulty model, and a residual force will only embolden Islamic radicals and arouse suspicions that U.S. interests are related more to oil than democracy promotion. “Any U.S. bases remaining in Iraq, either to keep a finger on the oil, or to act as a jumping off point for attacking Iran, will similarly quickly come under withering attack from Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda,” writes Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, a public-policy research organization.
The Lebanon Model
Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war illustrates that long and violent factional fighting can draw regional countries into a wider war. But some experts say Iraq is different and argue the sectarian violence would stay relatively contained and not spread to neighboring countries. “Such meddlers tend to seek advantage in their neighbors’ civil wars, not to spread them, which is why they rely on proxies to do their fighting,” write CFR's Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh in the Washington Post. “You can already see that pattern at work in Iraq today.”
The Lebanon model was promoted by some White House officials back in 2004 as a blueprint for dealing with Iraq. Before last summer’s war, Lebanon was seen as an example of how a failed state could transition into a relatively stable democracy in the Arab world, held together by a power-sharing arrangement, however tenuous. “It works in a flawed-but-muddling-through sort of way,” Michael J. Totten, a Beirut-based journalist, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in January 2006. “ what makes this place unique is that the Lebanese political system is nearly incapable of producing dictatorship.” Although eighteen months later, Lebanon teeters on the brink of sectarian war, some experts say its power-sharing agreement between sectarian camps with competing agendas and claims to land may provide a model, however flawed, for Iraq to follow.
But other analysts fear Iraq may result in something worse than Lebanon at its nadir in the 1980s. “Lebanon’s simmering civil war eventually burned itself out and left a coherent, albeit weak, state in its ashes,” writes Christopher J. Fettweis of the U.S. Naval War College in the Los Angeles Times. “Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrolled, lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most vital region in the world.” Democratic presidential candidates, similarly, regularly refer to the prospect of “genocide” in postwar Iraq.
The Vietnam Model
The Vietnam War ended in a four-year-long withdrawal of U.S. forces followed by the fall of Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese. In Vietnam, the U.S. military slowly handed over combat duties to local forces as part of its “Vietnamization” campaign. Some analysts say employing a similar strategy in Iraq would be complicated because the conflict is more of a communal civil war, not an ideological struggle for national liberation. “Such a policy,” writes CFR’s Stephen Biddle in Foreign Affairs, “might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it.” Some say the lesson of the “Vietnam model,” as it applies to Iraq, is to maintain a U.S. presence and economic aid to sustain a political solution. “The shame of Vietnam is not that we were there in the first place, but that we betrayed our ally in the end,” wrote former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird in Foreign Affairs. Adds Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state, in a recent op-ed: “The essential prerequisite for such a political solution is staying power in the near term.”
Fettweis says Vietnam is an apt comparison to Iraq because both represented major strategic mistakes in U.S. foreign policy, turning public opinion against the White House and against interventionism in general—what became know as “Vietnam Syndrome.” But he says the significance of pulling en masse out of Iraq, like Vietnam before it, may prove to be overplayed by the war’s architects. “ust as the war’s critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned out to be strategically irrelevant,” he writes. “Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance of Cold War power did not change.”
The Bosnia Model
The “nation building” parallels between Iraq and Bosnia are manifold. The Iraq Study Group, among other sources, has advocated a Dayton-like peace process to bring in Iraq’s neighbors to cooperate on border control and security operations. Moreover, Iraq’s Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites have made fitful attempts to reach a power-sharing agreement, much as the various ethnic factions did in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the mid-1990s. Troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have been compared to foreign troop proportions deployed to keep peace in the former Yugoslavia (to meet the troop-to-civilian ratios applied in Bosnia, the coalition would have to deploy 258,000 thousand forces to Iraq). And Bosnia may give development specialists a blueprint on rebuilding Iraq’s economy, particularly regarding how much foreign aid to give per capita.
But the main use of the “Bosnia model” has come from advocates who favor a looser federation rather than a centralized state, not unlike Bosnia post-1995. “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab, and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests,” wrote Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and the Council on Foreign Relations’ President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb in the New York Times. “In effect, Iraq is already becoming Bosnia,” adds Michael E. Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, writing in the Washington Times. Decentralization in Iraq, like Bosnia, would require land swaps, the separation of ethnic groups, and a political agreement that disperses powers to the regions, while keeping a unitary state. “Ethnic relocation is distasteful and not free from risk but if carried out with care as government policy, it can occur with less trauma than in the Balkans,” adds O’Hanlon.
Yet others disagree. More than a decade after the Dayton Peace accords, some say that Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims still do not share a unified vision for the country as a whole. “Of all the ironies of the American adventure in Iraq, perhaps none is larger than using the ‘success’ of Bosnia as a model to solve the sectarian violence now raging in Baghdad,” write Don Hays of the U.S. Institute of Peace, R. Bruce Hitchner of the Dayton Project, and Edward P. Joseph in the International Herald Tribune. “The Dayton legacy of balancing power at the central, cantonal, and local levels is hopelessly dysfunctional.” They say Bosnian Serbs, emboldened by Kosovo’s push for independence, may be poised to pull out of the Dayton arrangement. Moreover, Bosnia, given its porous borders, remains a lawless haven for drug and arms traffickers, terrorists, and other organized crime elements.
From CFR.org. Reprinted with permission. For more analysis on foreign policy and international relations, go to www.cfr.org.
Bush in Book: "I'll Kiss Your Ass" After Vote Former Tony Blair Adviser Spills Many Beans in Release of Diary Extracts
Tony Blair rejected the concerns of his cabinet in pushing for the US-backed invasion of Iraq, according to a new 'tell-almost-all' by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's media adviser for almost ten years.
Campbell resigned in August 2003 shortly after the suicide of British MoD scientist David Kelly, who killed himself after being implicated as a BBC's journalist's source for a story that the UK government was exaggerating its intelligence on Iraq's WMD program.
Despite his closest advisers' resistance to the planned invasion, Campbell believes Blair never had any doubts he was choosing the correct course of action, or else kept them well hidden. The release of Campbell's diary Monday has sparked a firestorm of coverage in the British media, providing endless fodder for revelations about the past ten years of British politics, including insight into Blair's relationship with Princess Diana, his long-speculated political compact with current PM Gordon Brown, and the role of religion in his decision-making.
But the passages generating the most discussion cover Campbell particularly privileged view of the inner-workings of the British government, and of Blair's contacts with President Bush, in the lead-up to the war. The following key quotes appear in The Blair Years: Extracts From the Diaries of Alastair Campbell, what one of the largest British bookstore chains is calling "the fastest selling political book in living memory."
The book is to be released in the US on July 31. 7 September 2002, on persuading President Bush to go to the UN over Iraq:"As we left Bush joked to me, 'I suppose you can tell the story of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazy unilateralist back from the brink.'"
On 28 February 2003, after just 5% of people questioned in Spain back the war: "(Blair) said to (Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria) Aznar that 4% was roughly the number you could get in a poll for people who believed Elvis was alive, so he had a struggle."
On 17 March 2003, the eve of the House of Commons vote on Iraq: "JP (John Prescott), John Reid and one or two other (cabinet ministers) looked physically sick. (John Reid) said... we will be judged by the Iraq that replaces Saddam."
On the day of the Iraq vote, Mr Campbell writes: "(Blair's) speech in the house was one of his best. "Very serious, full of real argument, confronting the points of difficulty and we felt it moving our way. "All of us I think had had pretty severe moments of doubt, but he hadn't really, or if he had he'd hidden them even from us.
"Now there was no going back at all." Shortly before the Commons debate, Mr Campbell recalls President Bush promising:"If you win the vote in Parliament, I'll kiss your ass."
Irritates Me to no end when ignorant people imply that there aren't American Terrorists and that "they" are in or from the middle east. Dumb and dumber PERIOD!!! When, my friends (U know whom u r on this site) can we get together and cook, laugh, etc., together? I hope in this lifex, somewhere, somehow. My man is all for it, as is my mother (bless her heart, she has given birth to 11 children) whom is a HOOT! Oh, editing again... My Dad and his wife are HOOTS also, my Dad is a gourmet cook, however, they really enjoy nudity. Now THAT is a no go for a get together!!! LOL hugs me
< Message edited by YellowSunshine -- 7/18/2007 2:29:03 PM >
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Faith, Hope and Love, the Greatest of these is LOVE!!!
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell
Dude. Theres a good model for us to follow but you'll have difficulty convincing the average Iraqi to work 20 hrs a day and give up his noomat Al Thuhur (afternoon nap). Now we have to try and convince the Iraqi government to scrap their plans to duplicate Iran as the most desired model. I dont think they'll be to happy about this because they wanted to fill Baghdad with Abayas and Khorma Zebzi.
Apparently the US president is still stuck in the Darwinian cycle, any comparison between Japan and South Korea is not valid as well, Iraq should try to make it’s own model, No Khorma Sabzy, or indeed Fasanjoon.
FlyBy, We must be on the same page it appears, at least most of the x. Perhaps u may have saw the link to photo of perhaps my good buddy, Mr. Ride Um Cowboy, as a youngster.
Some may have thought it was a baby monkey.
me
_____________________________
Faith, Hope and Love, the Greatest of these is LOVE!!!
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell
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