Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Israel invades Lebanon, Hezbollah attacks N. Israel

host · 08-06-2006, 01:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by magictoy

Yes.

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.

If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.

Here is the quote that I posted the challenge about, magictoy, please highlight the lines in Bush's answer to Gregory's question that support what you posted. I don't see anything that could be interpreted as "If.....put down their weapons today.... My point was that Bush gave an incoherent answer to Gregory's simple question.....Gregory asked it again, after receiving a rambling and incoherent reply, and, if you click on the link and read the whole text.....Bush failed in the second opportunity to answer the question:

Quote:

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache...s&ct=clnk&cd=2
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 28, 2006

Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair of the United Kingdom in Press Availability

......PRESIDENT BUSH: David Gregory.

Q Thank you. Mr. President, both of you, I'd like to ask you about the big picture that you're discussing. Mr. President, three years ago, you argued that an invasion of Iraq would create a new stage of Arab-Israeli peace. And yet today, there is an Iraqi Prime Minister who has been sharply critical of Israel. Arab governments, despite your arguments, who have criticized Hezbollah, have now changed their tune. Now they're sharply critical of Israel. And despite from both of you, warnings to Syria and Iran to back off support from Hezbollah, effectively, Mr. President, your words are being ignored. So what has happened to America's clout in this region that you've committed yourself to transform?

PRESIDENT BUSH: David, it's an interesting period because instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

For a while, American foreign policy was just, let's hope everything is calm, kind of managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested in its -- on September the 11th. And so we've taken a foreign policy that says, on the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short-run by being aggressive and chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice -- and make no mistake, they're still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for -- in the long-term, to defeat this ideology, and they're bound by an ideology. You defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

And, look, I fully understand some people don't believe it's possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible, and I believe it will happen. And so what you're seeing is a clash of governing styles, for example. The notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them, and so they respond. They've always been violent.

I hear this amazing kind of editorial thought that says, all of a sudden Hezbollah has become violent because we're promoting democracy. They have been violent for a long period of time. Or Hamas. One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles.

And so what the world is seeing is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope. And one of the challenges, of course, is to convince people that Muslims would like to be free, that there's other people other than people in Britain and America that would like to be free in the world. There's this kind of almost -- kind of weird kind of elitism, that says, well, maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy rejects that concept. We don't accept it.

And so we're working. And this is -- as I said the other day, when these attacks took place, I said this should be a moment of clarity for people to see the stakes in the 21st century. I mean, there's an unprovoked attack on a democracy. Why? I happen to believe, because progress is being made toward democracies. And I believe that -- I also believe that Iran would like to exert additional influence in the region. A theocracy would like to spread its influence using surrogates.

And so I'm as determined as ever to continue fostering a foreign policy based upon liberty. And I think it's going to work, unless we lose our nerve and quit. And this government isn't going to quit.

<h3>Q I asked you about the loss of American influence in the region......</h3>

magictoy, reporter David Gregory and I are not the only ones who had difficulty deciphering what the goals and the policies of the Bush admin. are now, in the M.E., Here's an excerpt from an attempt by one of only two republican moderates in the senate, to find out what U.S. policy is concerning Israel and it's neighbors. The argumentative and controversial UN ambassador, John Bolton, uses the same "root cause" talking points that Bush used in his "answer" to David Gregory, and IMO, Bolton's answer is similarly incoherent.......

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...072701906.html
CQ Transcripts Wire
Thursday, July 27, 2006; 10:49 PM

...Senator Chafee?

CHAFEE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Ambassador.

As you said, we have a crisis and tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. And without a doubt, this is an extremely important area in the world: energy-rich, all the religious areas that are important.

And in addressing that, you said that, "We are actively engaged in New York in identifying lasting solutions to bring about a permanent peace in the Middle East. To do so, however, requires that we have a shared understanding of the problem. The United States has a firm view that the root cause of the problem is terrorism, and this terrorism is solely and directly responsible for the situation we find ourselves in today."

And you're a brilliant man. That statement doesn't make any sense. Terrorism is a device. There's got to be something deeper for the root case.

Can you go a little deeper?

BOLTON: Well, I think the statement really refers to the conflict in Lebanon.

Now, I think the real root cause is the absence of a fundamental basis for peace in the region. And I think that striving to get to that point is the objective of our diplomacy now; not to simply acquiesce and a return to the status quo ante, but to see if there's not a way to turn the hostilities that are now going into shifting the basis on which we really deal in the region.

And that's why we have resisted calls for an immediate cease- fire, which has the risk of simply returning to the status quo ante.

Nobody is under any illusions about the complexity of the problem......

When you consider the following "background", it seems to explain how decisions that the Bush admin. made in 2001, to "shift toward Israel" along with the opinions of Bolton, Feith, and Rumsfeld that Israel should retain "biblical lands" and land Israel occupied because it "won the war", have resulted in the current lack of U.S. influence....or will.....to broker a cease fire:

Quote:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...&postcount=239
Posted on Sunday, July 23, 2006. Wayne White, now an Adjunct Scholar with Washington's Middle East Institute, was Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Middle East and South Asia Analysis until March 2005.....

1. Condoleezza Rice is leaving for the Middle East. Is her trip likely to lead to any favorable diplomatic outcome?

I don't think so. At least not anytime soon..........
I believe her activities have been tailored to give the impression of action while not designed to make any real progress toward the urgent ceasefire that should be everyone's highest priority.

Consider that the new Bush admin., more than nine months before 9/11, according to Paul O'Neill and others present at the first Bush national security meeting, abandoned pursuit of a diplomatic solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, and shifted to a focus on toppling Saddam and an Israel bias:

Quote:

http://www.mclaughlin.com/library/mo...ript.asp?id=33
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN'S "ONE ON ONE"

GUEST: RON SUSKIND, AUTHOR
RE: "THE PRICE OF LOYALTY"

TAPED: THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2004
BROADCAST: WEEKEND OF JANUARY 24-25, 2004

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The price of loyalty. In an extraordinary literary collaboration, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill shared his memories -- plus 19,000 pages of official documents -- with a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. The resulting book is a first x-ray of the inside of the Bush White House.....

....MR. SUSKIND: It was the first meeting of the National Security Council. The president presided, talked about how the National Security Council works,......

......MR. SUSKIND: And Condoleezza Rice. The president described this is the way it works. He threw it to Condi, said Condi will be managing this process.

And then he set policy right at the start of the administration. He said first off, we're going to pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict. There's nothing we can do to help those people. He talked about that for a while. Colin Powell expressed immediately reservations, saying if we do this -- this is 30 years of U.S. policy. We have been fully engaged. If we do this, we will unleash Sharon and it will tear the fabric of the Mideast. And the president said at some time, a show of force can be really clarifying. That's not a direct quote, but almost.......

......MR. MCLAUGHLIN: He said Clinton overreached and it all fell apart.

MR. SUSKIND: About the Mideast.....

.....MR. SUSKIND: Well, it sounded to people in the meeting as though it was, you know, preordained and scripted, meaning that this meeting was going to be about Iraq. Not everyone knew that prior to the meeting, based on the briefing documents that were available. But what became clear immediately at that point is it would be essentially a presentation on Iraq and what to do....

Quote:

http://www.issues2000.org/2004/Georg...ign_Policy.htm

President Bush echoed the [pro-Israel] view: 'We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. <h3>We're going to tilt back toward Israel."</h3> Bush continued, 'If the two sides don't want peace, there is no way we can force them.' Colin Powell said, 'a pullback by the US would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army.' ; Bush added, 'Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things
Source: The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind, p. 71-72 Jan 13, 2004

Consider that this article documents the Bush appointments to the DOD and State Dept. of several folks, including Perle, Feith and Bolton, who advocated, back in 1996, removing Saddam, and supporting the retention by Israel, of the "biblical lands", and Rumsfeld's officially distributed opinion that Israel won the "so called occupied" territory, in war.....a seemingly counterproductive opinion, compared to longstanding U.S., M.E. policy.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...45652-2003Feb8
Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy

....The Bush administration's alignment with Sharon delights many of its strongest supporters, especially evangelical Christians, and a large part of organized American Jewry, according to leaders in both groups, who argue that Palestinian terrorism pushed Bush to his new stance. But it has led to a freeze on diplomacy in the region that is criticized by Arab countries and their allies, and by many past and current officials who have participated in the long-running, never-conclusive Middle East "peace process.".....

..........One of Abrams's mentors, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, led a study group that proposed to Binyamin Netanyahu, a Likud prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, that he abandon the Oslo peace accords negotiated in 1993 and reject the basis for them -- the idea of trading "land for peace.
" Israel should insist on Arab recognition of its claim to the biblical land of Israel, the 1996 report suggested, and should "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

Besides Perle, the study group included David Wurmser, now a special assistant to Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, and Douglas J. Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy. Feith has written prolifically on Israeli-Arab issues for years, arguing that Israel has as legitimate a claim to the West Bank territories seized after the Six Day War as it has to the land that was part of the U.N.-mandated Israel created in 1948. Perle, Feith and Abrams all declined to be interviewed for this article.

Rumsfeld echoed the Perle group's analysis in a little-noted comment to Pentagon employees last August about "the so-called occupied territories." Rumsfeld said: "There was a war [in 1967], Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved . . . they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in some parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."............

......The State Department pressed for continued negotiations and pressure on Sharon to limit the scope of his military response to Palestinian suicide bombers, while the Pentagon and the vice president's office favored more encouragement for the Israelis, and less concern for a peace process which, they said, was going nowhere anyhow........

But the administration did make a series of statements and gestures intended to restrain Sharon's response to suicide bombings, and to reassert the traditional U.S. policy that Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank had to cease. At the urging of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Bush publicly embraced the idea of a Palestinian state.........

magictoy, it seems that the Bush M.E. policy has much more to do with a neo-con, christian right, influenced goal to "shift toward Israel", "take out Saddam", and inflict as much pain, militarily, on anyone who stand in opposition to these goals, on the ground in the M.E.

These policy goals were put on paper, by the people in the Bush admin.,who are now carrying them out, as far back as in 1996. There is reliable evidence from former U.S. treasury sec'ty Paul O'Neill, and from other attendees to the first., Jan. 30, 2001 Nat'l Security Council meeting of the new Bush admin., to support the notion that abandoning of the Israel/M.E. peace policy goals of all post 1952, U.S. presidents, was announced as the new policy, along with a "shift toward Israel", and Bush pronouncing that "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things", and then the meeting shifted to Iraq policy, which has dominated the agenda, ever since.

9/11 was still over nine months away, and there was and is, nothing happening that would contradict the present results of a pre-9/11 policy shift that replaced diplomacy with the use of U.S., and now IDF, military force.

Democratic elections have been held in Lebanon, in Iraq, and in the Palestinian state, and the problem is that the U.S. and Israel do not approve or accept the will of the voters who live in those "newly democratic" states.
There seems to be no acceptance by the U.S. or Israel, of the possibility that the voters in all three jurisdictions were influenced to vote for candidates that offered a militant opposition to the armed forces of both the U.S. and Israel.

It seems that the policy of the new, closer U.S./Israeli alliance is to try to kill the entire armed opposition. It isn't working out too well in Iraq, and it won't work in Gaza or in Lebanon, either.

magictoy, if you were an Arab, especially a male in young/middle adulthood, living in Iraq, Gaza or in Lebanon, how would you have reacted to the elections of Mr. Sharon and Mr. Bush and the policies that they pursued together? How would you react if you were living in one of those places, now? Would it make a difference if you were a sunni muslim, experiencing the effect of the rise of shia influence, unleashed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq?

Since the policy pre-dates 9/11, it follows that the Bush mantra that "9/11 changed everything".....is bullshit propaganda.....