steissd wrote:Granted, Syria is a totalitarian country, its citizens cannot do anything without having got a direct order from the authorities. In 30's hundreds of the Soviet Army officers (including generals, e.g. Stern, Rychagov, etc.) fought in Spain, and their official status was this of volunteers. But if they really were volunteers they would be unable to leave the territory of the USSR: these people were sent by Stalin. And if Syria sends its citizens to assist the enemies of the USA/UK, this is nothing else than an act of war[/color][/i].
I think that's not right. As an example take Germany. You can't deny that Germany was a totalitarian country in this time. Nevertheless many Germans fought against the Franco-Regime as volunteers. Following your "logic" Germany - as a totalitarian country - has done an act war against the Franco-regime, because German volunteers fought on the Republican side. The interesting aspect in this case is, that at the same time Germany (Legion Condor) fought on the side of the Franco-Regime against the legitimate, Republican, government. Supporting Franco and being at war with him at the same time seems to be impossible. Therefor it seems that there must be an error in your "logic".
steissd wrote:Quote:I believe that both sides will settle on a small number who actually return. This prediction is based on the current status quo.
But they may do this temporarily, just for acquiring majority in the Israeli population, demanding a national poll for future destiny of Israel, voting for its dismantling and returning to Paris (or wherever else in Europe they have settled)after their mission is accomplished. Therefore, agreement on returning of refugees is suicidal for Israel.
The issue of democratic takeover is the very reason the Arabs backed down from the "right to return", it is also the reason I said "a small number".
Incidentally most refugees are not in Western countries but rather in squalid camps.
I read Steissd's comments with great interest, finding them articulate and completely unconvincing. There really is a form of racial warfare going on there -- no, a better word would be tribal -- in which one side thinks it has the higher moral ground because it's grabbed the best real estate and has best armed defenders.
Two pieces I just heard on NPR while driving home I found interesting and perhaps as indicative of Arab attitudes towards the US as anything I've heard lately.
1) With respect to the looting of the archeological and other treasures, there is evidence that "others than Iraqis" were also involved. Whether that's true or not, what has really angered many West European nations and others is the news that American troops were stationed outside the museums and did nothing to stop the looters. I expect we'll hear a full range of Perfectly Rational Explanations, but the deed is done and we've got worse than egg on our faces. Maybe Bush will begin to take in that kulcha means something to a lot of people.
2) Maybe related, maybe not: Iraqis are politely thanking America for its "liberation" and asking America to go home now. NOW. Five days is too long in their view! I take this as a really good sign of a people who, though they may be emerging from an oppressive regime, have not lost their guts and brains and are willing to sort out their own affairs.
(I doubt we'll get out of there, and I doubt that, when we do, it will be with much credit.)
I'm with you on that one, Tartarin.
steissd wrote:Quote:I believe that both sides will settle on a small number who actually return. This prediction is based on the current status quo.
There may be another apocalyptic scenario. Majority of Palestinians living abroad have no intention to return: they have settled quite well in the West. But they may do this temporarily, just for acquiring majority in the Israeli population, demanding a national poll for future destiny of Israel, voting for its dismantling and returning to Paris (or wherever else in Europe they have settled)after their mission is accomplished. Therefore, agreement on returning of refugees is suicidal for Israel. Let any number return: to the independent Palestinian state. Unfortunately, the Arabs having already got an Israeli citizenship (and define themselves as Palestinians) will never leave Israel for Palestine: they have already got accustomed to the welfare state with acceptable level of corruption (that does not exceed this of the Mediterranean Europe), and they will never want to change it for citizenship of the classical Third World country.
C'mon, get real. Moving to another country and leave everything behind isn't the same like ordening a drink in a pub or change clothes for an evening out. This would mean quit your job, selling your house, leave friends and a known environment,.... And you think people will leave all of this because they want to dismantle Israel? You realy need a good doctor!
frolic wrote:Steissd, a question.
Why are Jews(not Israeli) from all over the world welcome to move to Israel and why are Palestinians not allowed to move to the region or even house they used to live in?
Since Steissd did not answer it, anyone else?
There may be some reality related considerations beyond pure judicial aspects. They may move to the area, but not to Israel. Very soon they will have the independent state of their own, and they should move there. Israel will not permit its being occupied by the hostile population under cover of the so-called solving of the humanitarian problem. If the Palestinian State in future wants to help to the diaspora Palestinians, it should permit them to return there (not to Israel), and to grant them Palestinian citizenship.
By the way, returning to Israel does not require leaving job and selling property. If the returning right covers Palestinians, they may acquire Israeli citizenship in consulates of Israel, and then they may vote there, without having left the countries they live in: such a procedure exists under Israeli law. If they manage by means of outnumbering the Jews impose on Israel Arafat or any other Arab as a prime-minister, the civil war will be inevitable. That is what they want to provoke, for later to call for international assistance for permitting the democratically elected PM to take an office. Therefore, Israel will never agree to extending of the returning right on the Arabs; they will have the country of their own, and they should return there if they want to.
BBC:Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar says Syria is a friend of his country and will not be the target of any military action.
He really is making a fool of himself.
The World is in no danger of running short of fools ... never has been, never will be.
Hmm, it seems strange. Syria is a country openly supporting terror, namely terror of Hizballah (to those that do not remember, I want to remind that besides numerous attacks on Israelis, Hizballah terrorists murdered 250 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1982).
Spain is the country that has serious problems with terror, ETA is still active. Therefore, there can be no reasonable explanation of any affiliation of Spain with Syria.
steissd wrote:Hmm, it seems strange. Syria is a country openly supporting terror, namely terror of Hizballah (to those that do not remember, I want to remind that besides numerous attacks on Israelis, Hizballah terrorists murdered 250 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1982).
Spain is the country that has serious problems with terror, ETA is still active. Therefore, there can be no reasonable explanation of any affiliation of Spain with Syria.
If u dont belief me there is still the BBC site to check out.
Robert Fisk:
Would President Assad invite a cruise missile to his palace?
15 April 2003
So now Syria is in America's gunsights. First it's Iraq, Israel's most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction - none of which has been found. Now it's Syria, Israel's second most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction, or so President George Bush Junior tells us. No word of that possessor of real weapons of mass destruction, Israel - the number of its nuclear warheads in the Negev are now accurately listed - whose Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been complaining that Damascus is the "centre of world terror".
But Syria is a target all right. First came the US claim that Damascus was sending gas masks to the Iraqi army. The Syrians denied it - but what if it's true? Why shouldn't an Arab neighbour offer Iraqi soldiers protective clothing during an American invasion which has no international legitimacy? Then Syria was accused of sending, or allowing, Arab "volunteers" to cross into Iraq to fight the Americans. This is much harder for the Syrians to deny. I've met a few of them here in Baghdad, most anxious to return to their homes in Homs and Damascus, others - from Algeria and Morocco - telling me that they will be safe if they can reach the Syrian border because "there will be no trouble from there". But here, too, there's a whiff of hypocrisy.
Whenever Israel goes to war, there are hundreds of "volunteers" from the United States rushing to Tel Aviv to join the Israel Defence Force, and America never complains.
But then comes the nastiest accusation: that members of the Iraqi regime have fled to Syria for safety. Given Syria's increasingly warmer relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in recent years, and the joint nature of their Baathist past - the Syrian Christian Michel Aflaq was a founder of the Baath in the days when it was a creature of both nations - it's difficult to believe that the Tariq Azizes and Taha Yassin Ramadans couldn't seek refuge in Syria.
Needless to say, the capture of Saddam's half-brother near the Syrian border has provoked the usual rash of stories. Tariq Aziz is living in Lebanon with the ladies of President Saddam's family. Untrue. The Arabic television satellite channel interviewed the ex-Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf in Damascus. Totally untrue. And also embarrassing for the Americans. For just as they failed to capture the most brutal of the Bosnian Serb murderers, Messrs Karadjic and Mladic, so they failed to find Osama bin Laden - or even Mullah Omar - and, given the failure of American intelligence in Baghdad, it wouldn't be that surprising if the whole of the Iraqi Cabinet managed to pass safely through an American checkpoint in an orange pantechnicon. But it's Syria that is being lined up for attack next, not the Saddam Cabinet.
And the signs were clear long ago. Take the article in The New York Times by Larry Collins - joint author with Dominique Lapierre of O Jerusalem! - which last month announced that the Syrian-supported Hizbollah resistance in Lebanon had 10,000 missiles that could fly to Tel Aviv and "leave in their wake devastation more terrible than anything Israel has ever known". The missiles are a myth - I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two weeks and there are no such missiles, as the UN force there will confirm - but this doesn't matter. And then it will be Libya who has the most sophisticated C-B weapons. Or Saudi Arabia. Or anyone else Israel wants attacked.
But this still leaves the question: could Saddam and his sons and Tariq Aziz and Ramadan and the rest have passed through Syria? Not impossible. But the idea that they would be allowed to stay seems incredible. If President Bashar Assad allowed Saddam to be a guest, it would be akin to inviting a cruise missile to his palace.
But Syria just might have provided a transit station for the Baath officials from Iraq. To where? My own favourite is Belarus - because its capital, Minsk, is awash in whisky, corruption and damp apartments (the first two of which would appeal to most Iraqi Baathists). Vladimir Putin, of course, would be asked to help to retrieve them and hand them over to Washington. And he would have a price, no doubt, a price involving oil concessions and Russia's already signed oil contracts in Baghdad ...
© 2003 Independent
What bothers me more than anything is that our administration and Blair keeps saying Syria is not in their gunsights, but the rhetoric is threatening. c.i.
I did not mean that Mr. Aznar did not utter the words that Frolic quoted. I considered Mr. Aznar's approach weird, not Frolic's quotation.
Cicerone Imposter wrote:What bothers me more than anything is that our administration and Blair keeps saying Syria is not in their gunsights, but the rhetoric is threatening. c.i.
I consider this being an attempt of diplomatic pressure on Syria. There is nothing wrong with this. Besides that, if any hostilities really start, such a war is supposed to be easier than the Iraqi one, and it may cause much less casualties. Assad's regime is not much more popular domestically than this of Saddam, and moral of the Syrian Armed Forces is already undermined by the information coming from the neighboring Iraq.
Quote:Besides that, if any hostilities really start, such a war is supposed to be easier than the Iraqi one, and it may cause much less casualties.
This is sad reasoning for a war, but sounds just like the rhetoric out of this pitiful regime!
It is not a reasoning at all, but if Syria does not change its approaches, then war may burst out. This will lead to liberation of Syria from the tyrannic regime of Assad family.
I posted this last night in A2K, but not, I guess, in this forum where it also belongs!:
Quote:Bush vetoes Syria war plan
Julian Borger in Washington, Michael White, Ewen MacAskill in Kuwait City and Nicholas Watt
Tuesday April 15, 2003
The Guardian
[Excerpt]
The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.
In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.
Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria".
However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria.
"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian. ..[/size]
However, this morning Rumsfeld announced that he was cutting the oil pipeline to Syria. Perhaps the disagreements within the administration remain, are possibly growing?
Quote:However, this morning Rumsfeld announced that he was cutting the oil pipeline to Syria. Perhaps the disagreements within the administration remain, are possibly growing?
Cutting oil pipeline is not an act of war; it is just a correction of a wrong decision made by Saddam.
