One of the marks of traumatic stress is a constant feeling of guilt. Some of the rescue workers at Ground Zero on 9/11 still suffer from survivor guilt today. They constantly wonder, "Why did those people die? Why not me?"
Yet guilt is what makes civilized society possible; it's what keeps us from unleashing our most selfish impulses on each other. Not everybody is capable of feeling guilt. Psychopaths do not experience it. That is a defining feature of the disorder. That is why psychopaths can do things that would haunt most of us forever. Think of O.J. Simpson, or a repeating child abuser who never shows remorse.
Some human beings flip guilt on its head, and turn it into rage against others. That may be true for Jimmy Carter and his NSC Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who are constantly blaming others for the fatal blunder of bringing the nuke-mad mullahs to power in Iran in 1979. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have died as a result, but neither Carter nor Brzezinsky has ever owned up to their responsibility. They don't seem to feel guilt about the looming threat of mullahs with nukes, but they are constantly pointing the finger at others.
Which brings me to George Soros, one of the top 100 richest people in the world. Mr. Soros is one of those odd hybrids, the socialist capitalist: He has made it very big indeed, but he doesn't want others getting rich in free markets. Instead, we are told, he wants "a strong central international government to correct for the excesses of self-interest." Such as his own $8.5 billion fortune, presumably, made partly on currency speculation.
Soros is the moneybags behind Moveon.org and Media Matters, two Leftwing fronts that constantly try to drop Black PR bombs in the media, always trying to smear the democratic Right. But they are so rage-driven, so far beyond the pale, that they risk triggering a backlash. Moveon couldn't resist smearing one of the most admirable people in America, General David Petraeus, as "General Betray-Us," in the pages of the New York Times. Media Matters tried to get away with smearing the biggest patriotic voice in the country, Rush Limbaugh.
Moveon and M-M are slander squads funded by György Schwartz, later known as György Soros (with two sh-sounds), and later George Soros, US citizen. In his autobiograpy, modestly entitled Soros on Soros, he described how as a teenager he helped to cart off the stolen possessions of Hungarian Jewish men, women and children after they were rounded up and transported to death camps. He claims it never bothered him a bit, and still doesn't bother him today. He has no personal regrets about his actions. Somebody would have done it.
Normal people are haunted by harsh self-criticism after such morally toxic situations, even if they were helpless at the time. But Mr. Soros is blessedly free from any qualms, as he tells us.
From a 60 Minutes interview with Soros on December 20, 1998:
KROFT: (You) went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't see the connection. But it created no problem at all.
(Note: Mr. Soros was not a child in 1944. Teenagers are well aware of moral rules.)
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was --- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets, that if I weren't there, of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt."
George Soros absolves himself constantly. He calls himself a "spectator" when he was an active collaborator. His only reply is that, well, he could have been "on the other side" --- a victim rather than a perp. His is an instrumental morality.
Now we don't know exactly what happened sixty years ago in the life of György Schwartz during the Nazi Holocaust. According to Robert Slater, "George Soros later said that he grew up in a Jewish, anti-semitic home,' and that his parents were uncomfortable with their religious roots.'" We don't know if his parents' anti-semitism influenced his willingness to cart off the property of his Jewish neighbors. But by 1944, Hitler's plans for the Jews could not be denied. Soros himself escaped persecution by being adopted as a Christian. He must have known what he was doing therefore, even as a teenager. Two years later, when Auschwitz and the other death camps made headlines all over the Western world, not even the young Soros could have denied his role in what happened. But George Soros felt free of guilt.
Soros' parents were internationalists, promoting the worldwide spread of a single language, Esperanto. Chances are they were anti-Nazi, but also anti-American. Little György grew up speaking Esperanto, the language of the Socialist Paradise to Come. But reality intervened, and Soros became a highly successful capitalist, in some pretty dubious ways. For instance, Soros has been blamed for crashing the national currency of Malaysia in 1997. He is still hated for that by Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of that country, who has emerged as a major international voice of Islamic anti-Semitism. Soros claims that somebody would have profited from speculating in Malaysian currency. He may be right. But many of us might not want to be anywhere near the crashing currency of a poor country, even if somebody else would do it anyway. We would feel ashamed to profit from disaster.
According to Wikipedia,
Soros is famously known for breaking the Bank of England' on Black Wednesday in 1992. On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency. ... He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England. ... Soros first traded currencies during the Hungarian hyperinflation of 1945-1946.
In 2002 a French court ruled that Soros was guilty of insider trading, and fined him $2 million. Who knows? He might be innocent. But there is a repeated pattern of manipulative and destructive actions in Mr. Soros' life.
According to Byron Rork of the National Review, "the (Soros) Open Society Institute gave $20,000 in September 2002 to the Defense Committee of Lynne Stewart." Stewart is the "activist" lawyer who secretly passed messages for the "blind sheik" and his fellow Muslim terrorists convicted of trying to truck bomb the World Trade Towers in 1993.
Soros funded support for democracy movements in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union, but he also supported marijuana legalization in California and elsewhere, which is irresponsible, to say the least. Marijuana has been credibly linked to psychotic breaks and other mental disorders in adolescence. Marijuana smoke contains some of the same carcinogens as tobacco smoke, although no causal link has been established as yet. Proving such a link takes years and hindreds of millions of dollars.
Why would any responsible person pay for a campaign that will end up making highly potent marijuana more available to vulnerable people? If booze harms millions of alcoholics, why double the risk by legalizing yet another powerful brain drug?
Soros was also a major backer of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002, supposedly "to get money out of politics" --- whereupon he immediately funded Leftist front groups using loopholes in the same law. It was other people's money he didn't want in politics. Politicians are now collecting just as much money as before, and from some very dubious sources. (See Norman Hsu.)
In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death." He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush, "if someone guaranteed it." Soros later claimed he was joking. But he has written articles such as "The Capitalist Threat" in the Atlantic Monthly, and funded something called "Democracy Alliance: In Search Of A Permanent Democratic Majority." It seems he wasn't joking after all.
He looks like he wants total power for the Left. And now we find Mr. Soros backing aggressive Leftist smear groups in America.
Mr. Soros also blames Israel for the fate of the Palestinian Arabs sixty years ago. Israel was founded as a place of refuge for millions of Jews from places like Hungary, the same people Soros helped to dispossess as a teenager. As he said in his 60 Minutes interview, his Holocaust experience "helped to shape his character" --- a double-edged comment if ever there was one.
Mr. Soros fancies himself to be a philosopher, like so many educated middle-Europeans. Well, Adam Smith was professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh; we know him as the first economist to clearly state the benefits of free trade. But Adam Smith always emphasized the importance of having a clear moral compass. Capitalism in the raw is not the same as capitalism constrained by morality and law. Soros seems to think of capitalism as a kind of piracy, and personal morality does not seem to play a conspicuous role in his life. Instead, he seems to like to be the supreme manipulator.
It makes an interesting psychological profile, doesn't it? On the one side, calm denial about his Holocaust role in Hungary, and decades later, about his part in manipulating currencies from Britain to Asia, benefiting himself but impoverishing others. On the other hand, his funding of very aggressive political mudslinging teams in the United States, openly trying to bring down a twice-elected president of the United States. Add to that his animosity toward Israel, a home for Jewish refugees from the same European Holocaust that saw him collaborating with the Nazis.
We live in a time of steady public decline in civilized values. The Left shamelessly peddles the idea that real patriotism means leaking national security secrets when our soldiers are risking their lives in combat. The national media have become so vulgarized that scapegoating GOP presidents has become the open aim of the "profession" of journalism. Opportunistic demagogues like Al Gore jump on the phony Global Warming bandwagon, and are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thus raising his public image while debasing the Nobel Prize.
We have seen immense vulgarization in one generation, a loss of simple decency in public life. Much of that decline has been deliberately pushed by the Left and the tabloid press, which is no longer separate from the "mainstream" press. Sociopathy is flying high.
Now long-distance diagnosis is not usually a good idea, but Mr. Soros has given us a lot of personal facts to ponder. His is not the profile of a kind man. It is the mind of a narcissist, free of the pangs of conscience, yet haunted by a need to destroy the reputations of decent people for having a different point of view.
Soros shows us the sense of infinite superiority of the European Left, always managing to explain away millions of victims, as long as they die somewhere out of sight. But George Soros is not a man at peace with himself, nor with a civilized life that is governed by a sense of responsibility and self-restraint. In his manipulative assaults on the Bush Administration, in peddling the legalization of harmful drugs, in pushing for "campaign reform" and then immediately driving a monster truck through the legal loopholes, George Soros may be trying to chase off his inner demons.
He fits perfectly in the company of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, of Hillary and Harry Reid, and all the self-loving, destructive narcissists of the Left. And that little conclusion paragraph sums it all up. Narcissism and psychopathy.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
10/16/2007 18:49 ||
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With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago?
Make no mistake about it, that massacre of hundreds of thousands -- perhaps a million or more -- Armenians was one of the worst atrocities in all of history. As with the later Holocaust against the Jews, it was not considered sufficient to kill innocent victims. They were first put through soul-scarring dehumanization in whatever sadistic ways occurred to those who carried out these atrocities.
Historians need to make us aware of such things. But why are politicians suddenly trying to pass Congressional resolutions about these events, long after all those involved are dead and after the Ottoman Empire in which all these things happened no longer exists? The short answer is irresponsible politics.
People of Armenian ancestry in the United States and around the world are justifiably outraged at what happened in the Ottoman Empire -- and at subsequent governments in Turkey which have refused to acknowledge or accept historical responsibility for the mass atrocities that took place on their soil. But the sudden interest of Congressional Democrats in this issue goes beyond trying to pick up some votes.
They want a resolution to condemn what happened as "genocide" -- a word that provokes instant anger among today's Turks, since genocide means a deliberate government policy aimed at exterminating a whole people, as distinguished from horrors growing out of a widespread breakdown of law and order in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. These are issues of historical facts and semantics best left to scholars rather than politicians.
If Congress has gone nearly a century without passing a resolution accusing the Turks of genocide, why now, in the midst of the Iraq war? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this resolution is just the latest in a series of Congressional efforts to sabotage the conduct of that war.
Large numbers of American troops and vast amounts of military equipment go to Iraq through Turkey, one of the few nations in the Islamic Middle East that has long been an American ally. Turkey has also thus far refrained from retaliating against guerrilla attacks from the Kurdish regions of Iraq onto Turkish soil. But the Turks could retaliate big time if they chose.
There are more Turkish troops on the border of Iraq than there are American troops within Iraq. Turkey has already recalled its ambassador from Washington to show its displeasure over Congress' raising this issue. The Turks may or may not stop at that. In this touchy situation, why stir up a hornet's nest over something in the past that neither we nor anybody else can do anything about today?
Japan has yet to acknowledge its atrocities from the Second World War. Yet the Congress of the United States does not try to make worldwide pariahs of today's Japanese, most of whom were not even born when those atrocities occurred. Even fewer, if any, Turks who took part in attacks on Armenians during the First World War are likely to still be alive.
Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush's war -- and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war. In a rare but revealing slip, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said that an American victory in Iraq "would be a real big problem for us" in the 2008 elections.
Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, Congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations -- and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.
Posted by: ryuge ||
10/16/2007 07:42 ||
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#1
Point taken. But I see this as an opportunity to give the Turks the much deserved slap the administration has refused to give them. Turkey actively obstructed the liberation of Iraq, actively suppresses Kurdish sovereignty and has regularly impinged upon the sovereignty of a democratic Iraq now to the point of threatening war.
The Democrats do not mean to help the President, the Kurds or the cause of liberty but this measure may do just that if it brings matters to a head. Beyond the local situation, anything which serves to prevent Turkey integrating into the EU is to be welcomed.
Finally, there is the matter of elementary justice. The fact Japan has yet to take responsibility for its actions - to even acknowledge its actions - is no defense for others whose morality is impaired. The model is Germany, not Japan.
#2
Sabotage is a good word to use in describing what the dhimmirats have been doing to obstruct the efforts of our troops at every turn. Between the Democrats and their accomplices the MSM and the left it is a surprise we have made any headway in Iraq. Despite these enemies, Iraq has been liberated of a brutal dictator who engaged in genocide in our time. A form of democracy has been established in Iraq. AQ is being pacified. Iraq, hopefully, will stand on its own feet because of our efforts. AQ is being denied a terrorist base from which to spread its poison to the rest of the world. Commerce is returning to Iraq.
Now something needs to be done about AQ in Pakiland. Something has to be done about Iran and Syria to further stabilize the region.
#5
ASIA TIMES > THE GEOPOLITICAL STAKES OF MYANMAR'S "SAFFRON REVOLUTION". espec to world shipping iff normal freight routes were denied. *Short of war to liberate the Straits of Malaccas, etal., latter means NORTH AMERICAN SUPERHIGHWAY + ARTIC/ANTARTIC ROUTES [northern Russia-FE, southern Africa, etc]may become prioritized.
What happens after the surge? After 21,500 additional U.S. troops have come and gone, will we have won in Iraq? Will we have extinguished the insurgency and rooted out the dead-enders? Or will the insurgents maintain their capacity to destabi¬lize the government through harassment and interdiction of its military and police forces and sectarian provocation?
There is no magic bullet. Even six full U.S. brigades and 18 U.S. battalions, alongside 13 Iraq Army brigades and eight Iraqi National Police brigades sweeping neighborhoods in Baghdad, cannot by themselves win this war, particularly when their presence in those neighborhoods is not perma¬nent. When those boots on the ground march out of Baghdad, the situation may be substantially improved, but the militias, the Sunni-Shiite divide and lack of counterbalancing national institu¬tions will remain.
A temporary surge cannot deliver perma¬nent victory. The insurgents who evade the surge are taking a calculated risk. Unable to prevail against surge military power, they cede control rather than accept battle. Once the surge is over, they intend to re-establish control. This calculation is based on their assessment that opposing and competing post-surge local forces will not pose as sig¬nificant a threat to their survival as accept¬ing battle with surge military. Unless and until the coalition creates a significant threat that is local and permanent, both U.S. and Iraqi armies will either have to take up per¬manent residence in Baghdad or repeatedly clear previously cleared neighborhoods.
If you want to beat the insurgents, analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Currently, insurgents exploit the gap between U.S. and Iraqi military and police forces. Faced with conventional military power, they disperse and evade as guerrillas. Against a dispersed police force, they consolidate and attack as militias. Their unconventional structure allows them to rapidly adapt to changing conditions. As a result, for insurgents, accepting battle is voluntary. Coalition forces cannot decisively engage insurgents who will not fight. A purely conventional military solution will not work. To engage, we must attack what they must defend. To win, we must attack that with overwhelming advantage and resolve.
To survive, insurgents maintain control of and conceal themselves in the local popula¬tion. Without a pliant local population to hide in, insurgents become visible, can be engaged and can be defeated. In the brutal Darwinian process of war, the slow, the stu¬pid and the uncommitted have been culled. Todays insurgent militias and sectarians recruit from and fully integrate into their respective local populations. Consequently, they possess natural attributes of local knowl¬edge, language, culture and permanence. These natural attributes become advantages against a transient and/or foreign govern¬mental force. To maintain control, insurgents use savage intimidation as the stick and social services, ideolo¬gy and/or religion as the carrot. For Iraqis in these neighbor¬hoods, accepting insurgent control is in their clear self-interest: Opposition results in death, acceptance results in benefits both material and spiritual that they dont get from the government.
To win, we must both successfully compete with and oppose the insurgency. To compete with the insurgents, we must match their natural attributes of local knowledge, language, culture and permanence. And we must rival or preclude the sum total of benefits they deliver in the neighborhoods where they operate. To successfully oppose the insurgents, we must contravene their ability to disperse and hide. We must match their consolidated tactical power. The fight is for control of the population, not terrain. To control the population, we must be in and of the population.
The missing piece is a popular force that operates in the gap that insurgents currently dominate. Both opposed to and in competition with the insurgents and precisely organized for local survival, this popular militia, a National Guard, would provide a direct government-neighborhood interface, grant mutual aid and social services. It becomes the local represen¬tation of the national government. Permanent, defensive and static, it would provide cost-effective, long-term self-defense against insurgent guerrillas and militias by drawing from the same local resources. Providing security, delivering and administering government assistance to the neighborhoods, it would also act as an induction facility for the disenfran¬chised, providing a direct means to enter government service.
Integrated with police, military and government, the National Guard will be used to ring insurgent areas, cutting off their tacti¬cal mobility. Recruited from Iraqi neighborhoods and serving in those neighborhoods, they match the insurgents natural attrib¬utes. Providing intelligence to the military, support to the police and direct liaison to the government, they will encroach upon insurgent areas, competing for, enlisting and ultimately control¬ling their local populations. Directly opposing the insurgent by force of arms, the National Guard can consolidate and disperse as needed with the same, if not greater, facility than the insur¬gent because it does not conduct offensive operations or opera¬tions outside its designated neighborhoods. Additional fire power as needed can be provided through liaison to local Iraqi police brigades, and Iraqi or U.S. military units. It matches the insurgent advantages because it is counterorganized to gain the insurgents structural advantages.
Under Iraqi provincial control, administered, run and supplied by the Armys Green Berets, this type of local force should become a standard and immediate component of any and all U.S. Phase IV (post-conflict) operations. It plugs the gap in conventional force structure where insurgents typically operate, matches their natural attributes, contra¬venes their tactical advantages and rivals their social bene¬fits. The point of any surge should be to establish and hand over local population control to permanent Iraqi National Guard units, and then back them up. Currently, we have cre¬ated local forces, the Iraqi Army and police, which mirror our own conventional strengths and weaknesses. To inno¬vate, we must create local forces that mirror the insurgents strengths and weaknesses.
#1
So, Mr. Katz, you're advocating that eg. the Sunni tribal militias which currently fight alongside our troops and the Iraqi army units should eventually be turned into a uniformed national guard like we have in the U.S.? I'm not arguing or challenging, just making sure I understand.
#3
David J. Katz is director at Luster Nationals defense, security and intelligence division. He is a former Army captain and Green Beret.
If the David J. Katz who wrote the piece at the Armed Forces Journal site is the same as the davekatz who posted the same piece here, then he deserves a detailed critique -- including thoughts on improving his writing style for the civilian market. ;-)
#4
Please pretend I closed that tiny bit of html code (you can't imagine how proud I am to write that!!) right after Journal, and all the rest is not italicized.
#6
I think the term National Guard creates the misunderstanding. Properly, this is more a hybrid of the military and the Interior ministry into a federal police. This takes the Interior ministry out of the police business, and makes them more like the US Justice Department, with this new unit being like the FBI.
But imagine if our FBI was more military in its organization, more like the Mexican Federales.
The hybrid would give them military discipline and weaponry, which tends to be much less sectarian, but their mission is of Interior Ministry policing.
Their focus would be against terrorist organizations, illegal militias, and large criminal gangs, all of whom would have more firepower than typical police would be able to take care of.
#8
I think Mr. Katz is confuzing the non-federaly recognized state militia (i.e. the Tennessee Defense Force. Yes, that's what it's called. Yeee-haaa!) with the National Guard (i.e. 278th ACR). From the description, the mission he proposes falls under a local territoral militia AOR. A National guard implies a federal structure to the nation-state that does not exist in Iraq.
Iraq is too centralized a state to have the sort of semi-federalized militia-reserve hybrid that we currently call the National Guard.
Posted by: N guard ||
10/16/2007 21:40 Comments ||
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What do Iran, the Arab League, the Palestinian leadership, the Israeli Right, the Israeli Left, the Israeli punditocracy and the omnipresent and eternally anonymous "senior Israeli defense officials" all have in common? They are all contributing members of the "Coalition of the Willing" - those willing to predict that the Annapolis meeting/summit will fail terribly and precipitate adverse consequences.
It's a strange form of unilateralism that Condoleezza Rice encounters here. She alone seems to want Annapolis to work.
Everyone has a well-reasoned explanation. Iran has come up with the usual and predictably silly vitriol on US-Zionist collusion. The Arab League wants an Israeli endorsement of the Saudi plan as a precondition. The Palestinians believe that after rejecting the Clinton package at Camp David seven years ago, and after unleashing a murderous wave of suicide bombings, they should be rewarded and their demands upgraded to include the refugee issue and Jerusalem, "or else."
Or else what?
THE ISRAELI politicians and pundits are both amazed and distraught that Secretary Rice can't fully comprehend the infinite complexity and inner-beauty of Israeli coalition politics. They evoke disingenuous one-liners like "Our voters won't stand for " or "The government will fall if " and the ultimate doomsday warning about the peace process (what peace process, exactly?) tragically disintegrating because Annapolis wasn't "planned well."
In comparison, most things planned in the Middle East usually work impeccably. Ergo, it's America's fault. After all, the yardstick by which one measures the success of US policy is how savvy a secretary is in deciphering the political minds of ministers Ruhama Balila-Avraham and Gideon Ezra, or the subtle differences between Shaul Mofaz, Fuad Ben-Eliezer, Ronnie Bar-On and, of course, Minister Eli Yishai.
RICE SHOULD be commended for at least trying to learn what these politicians believe in (hint: not much) and express to them how the US sees things (which they understand significantly better only when they get to travel to Washington).
She's too involved, says the political Right. Not involved enough, replies the old Left. Involved adequately, but doesn't get it, say astute politicians (those astute enough to have been involved in last summer's Lebanon war). Involved in favor of Israel, claim the Palestinians. Not involving us, the Europeans complain. She's too involved in Iraq, anyway, the collective Middle East wisdom concludes, sealing her fate.
Naturally, if Annapolis fails, it will be "her" failure, not ours. It's about "her legacy," not our future. She'll stay in sweaty Washington or go back to miserable Palo Alto, and we'll stay here happily ever after and casually add her name to a notoriously long list of US secretaries who just "didn't get it" as profoundly and richly as we do.
Not everyone wants her to fail, but to warn her that failure can be intolerable. "Failure Risks Devastating Consequences" was the headline of an open letter sent to Rice, published by the The New York Review of Books" in its November 8 issue.
The writers, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, Rice's mentor, Brent Scowcroft, and former ambassador Thomas Pickering urge her to present in Annapolis a five-point general plan based on UN resolution 242 and the Clinton package of 2000.
RICE HAS the unenviable, but attainable task of reconciling the parties' diverging ideas of Annapolis: Israel, which wants a Seinfeld summit (about nothing) and the Palestinians, who want things they neither deserve nor will get. She needs to essentially draft a concluding statement before the summit even convenes, a statement that, by the laws of nature and politics, cannot please everyone equally.
It has to be general enough for Ehud Olmert to maintain his coalition and fend off claims that he made concessions without reciprocity. Yet it has to be substantive enough if some form of bilateral negotiations will follow. It must be kept vague in terms of not rendering one side a loser and, at the same time, contain details that would constitute a formative document, one that will be referred to in later stages.
While Rice has been cautious and has lowered expectations of her current shuttle, she must recognize the fact that Israel and the Palestinians are not equal detractors. Olmert may be weak politically and his coalition fragile, but the process is supported by a majority of Israelis who know what it entails and have both an understanding and a willingness to accept the contours of a final-status agreement.
The Palestinians are a different story. They have a weak Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas-controlled Gaza, a track record of minimal compliance with agreements, a resounding failure to curb terrorism and demonstrable incompetence in running the institutions and processes of a state apparatus.
Let there be no doubt. Whatever shortcomings this administration has exhibited in the region, Secretary Rice cannot fail in Annapolis. We can.
Posted by: Fred ||
10/16/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Ironically, in the Bizarro World that is the ME, all of the acrimony and negativism before the meeting might be a good sign.
In a traditional Casbah, when a potential buyer approaches a seller, but neither say much of anything, there is little chance of a sale.
But when the buyer wants to buy and the seller wants to sell, they will immediately launch into each other with criticism, ridiculous demands, feigned outrage, and other obnoxious behavior.
It is almost pro forma, and after the formalities, they settle down to intense negotiations, only punctuated with snippets of further bad behavior.
#3
Rice seems like a weak Secretary of State. Would rather see someone like a John Foster Dulles or a George Marshall of recent times in the office--someone who is stronger to deal with the WOT.
#4
There is no reason to have this summit. The precondition necessary for a successful peace negotiation is not there, to whit both sides willing to end all conflict. This is posturing to assure the Muslim world that the U.S. is even handed.
#6
Israel's adversaries have NO INTENTION of coming to a live-and-let-live agreement. Like the Arafish, a summit would be used to build up some false hope, then it would later be dashed. It is a script that is getting old. Israel and the US have played into it. The arabs can't win a war, so they are playing psyops and propaganda. To negotiate, one needs goodwill from both parties. There is no good will here. This is just a meeting to subsidize caterers and others in the hospitality industry.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
10/16/2007 20:32 Comments ||
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#7
such a cynic, AP. I'm sure the Paleos mean well, this time
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/16/2007 20:39 Comments ||
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#8
But when the buyer wants to buy and the seller wants to sell, they will immediately launch into each other with criticism, ridiculous demands, feigned outrage, and other obnoxious behavior.
Posted by: anonymous5089 ||
10/16/2007 10:53 ||
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#1
Yet more curious: That muslims and FrontPage should both persist in pretending Europe is in some sense "Christian". The main reason we are in this mess is a post-Christian West - and its apologists in the White House - refuse to defend are history, traditions and most elementary values.
#2
The problem is most Christian values are very easy to defend if you remove the religious rational/terminology that instantly puts up some peoples defenses. Yet he politicians still don't stand up.
I was in the car this afternoon, listening to a debate about Ann Coulter, and her remarks about Jews needing the perfection of Christianity. Never quite thought of her as a religious sort, frankly, and I am not interested in her thoughts on theology. The comments werent remarkable, but the subsequent tempest was. Religion in a diverse society is a masked ball without midnight. Its agreed that the masks stay on.
Should they slip off, you learn things.
Look: many people who are serious about their religious beliefs are quite convinced of the superiority of their creed; its not as if the Pope sits up nights wondering whether Buddha might be on to something. I say many instead of most because there are millions of cultural Christians in the country who have a casual sense of creedal superiority which they dont indulge, examine, or display. If they do, they err on the side of the Shrug: to each his own. But you cant say you have the One True Path and believe that other paths lead to the same destination. There are people who believe that everyone can graze from the Old Country Buffet of Theology and still assemble in the common afterlife of the parking lot, and nevermind the details; theyre mostly liberal Christians in the West who regard tolerance and coexistence as values more important than witnessing and converting. If nothing else, they prefer to lead by example. There are others of all faiths whose indifference to the beliefs of others has less to do with a commitment to religious pluralism and tolerance than a disinterest in the paths others take. In the abstract, they hope youll come around. If not, well, thats how it plays out.
Every faith that builds on another regards itself as the last word. So Coulters remarks werent unusual; they were just impolitic. We dont get into the details, because the details breed friction
For some, however, anyone who ventures into the thicket of theological disputations is equally suspect, which led a guest on the Medved show today to utter a stupendously idiotic judgment: she found Ann Coulters remarks as offensive as a jihadis snuff video of Daniel Pearls execution. It was an interesting remark, because you could sense the parameters of her intellectual terrain. There is a big comfy warm spot in which the smart and decent people reside, and beyond that there be dragons. If these people believe in the warm mealy notions that hold all cultures equal, and regard the assertion of a cultures values as the equivalent of passing gas in the museum, youll naturally get this. If such a mild assertion merits a visit from the police, then any frank expressions of doctrine will earn the same, until sermons turn into room-temp gruel. But I suspect the efforts of the police will be selectively applied, in order to assure all that the hitherto dominant culture has assumed the supine position the times require.
Multiculturalism is simply the state between two different cultures.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/16/2007 06:20 ||
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When I listen to Ann Coulter, sometimes I think somebody should invade the offices of National Review, kill the leaders, and convert the rest to Christianity.
Well, that's what Ann would have done.
Besides , there was the book of hers where she wrote of how Americans always imagined themselves as being in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and not as Maine clodhoppers. Um, has she ever visited Gettysburg?
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
10/16/2007 23:14 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
