IT'S ABOUT TIME!

[Meerkat]

Bush exposes settlements as threat to Mideast peace (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=679&ncid=742&e=1&u=/usatoday/20030922/cm_usatoday/11862435)


Bush emphasized that point last week, when the administration warned that the United States would reduce $9 billion in loan guarantees to Israel for every dollar it spends on settlements. In addition, he is stepping up pressure to halt Israel's construction of a 400-mile security fence around several settlements for fear it will be used as a permanent extension of Israel's eastern border in land that rightfully constitutes a Palestinian state.

Bush's actions send an important message to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites). They put him on notice that the U.S. has grown impatient with his insincere pledges to remove or freeze dozens of settlements. Instead, in a defiant game of "whack-a-mole," Sharon's government encourages new outposts even as it dismantles existing ones. Settlements were expanded even during the six-week ceasefire by Palestinian terrorists this summer.

[Meerkat]

Hmmm, I guess everybody does agree with me that it's time that Israel started playing more fairly or get cut off from the nipple.

[Chadd Hamilton]

Yes, I think these actions are long overdue. Let's watch and see if the US administration follows through on it's promise.

[Mrleft8]

PFFFFFT! Can you say:"let's say something before the UN meeting, so we don't get accused of favoritism"?

[km gresham]

:rolleyes: Damned either way isn't he, Lefty?

[TimH]

why do we care so much about Isreal? what about US? United States = US = us, not them...US There are lot of problems here on our own soil.

[Nicholas Carey]

Originally posted by TimH:
why do we care so much about Isreal? what about US? United States = US = us, not them...US There are lot of problems here on our own soil.For a somewhat disturbing essay on just this very topic as well as a somewhat broader view of the so-called "Middle East Crisis" written with a coldly analytical eye by a nice jewish boy, read this piece by Phil Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com/) at http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/index.html
Are Arab Leaders Crazy?

Let's step back for a moment and look at Arab political leadership. Americans tend to be smug about the superiority of our political system. We don't have politicians killing everyone in a town because they think the townsfolk won't vote for them (Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, Hama 1982; official government death toll 20,000 but human rights organizations estimate closer to 40,000), beheading citizens for expressing dissenting points of view (Saudi Arabia), declaring 40 percent of the government budget "missing" while building new villas and buying new Mercedes for their cronies (Yasser Arafat), etc. Does this make us morally superior to Arabs? Let's consider first that Arab leaders are not elected. People who live in an Arab country are subjects of the rulers. The job of an Arab leader is to figure out how the people can be made to serve him, not vice versa.

The closest analog in American society is the public corporation. The textbooks and some legal statutes say that the CEO and the Board are supposed to serve the interests of the shareholders. In practice the directors and top executives of American corporations siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder wealth into their personal bank accounts during the 1990s. Jack Welch in Straight from the Gut proudly states that during his 20 years as General Electric CEO the "employees", by which he means himself and some other top managers, went from 1% to 31% ownership of GE. Rephrased, Jack and his golf partners stole 30% of GE from the investors who owned the company in 1980. [The most notorious Third World kleptocrat was Mobutu Sese Seko, estimated to have diverted as much as $5 billion in funds during 30 years of rule in Zaire (now the Congo). Measured against Congo's current annual GDP of $32 billion it would seem that Mobutu's slice was much smaller than the GE executives'.]

There is no reason to expect an Arab dictator to behave more altruistically than an American business executive. In fact, the Arab leader who behaves out of self-interest violates no trust or law unlike his American CEO counterparts.

Suppose that you managed to seize power in an Arab country. What would your first order of business be? Dictatorship is never a guaranteed long-term gig and therefore most people have started by transferring all the money that they could find into their personal Swiss bank accounts. Your second order of business is ensuring the happiness of your subjects. You don't actually care whether or not they're happy but you don't want them rioting in the streets and interfering with the flow of cash to Switzerland. Unless a subject is one of your cronies you can't make him happy with money or improved material conditions because you're moving all of the country's wealth into your own pockets. What you can offer your subjects is pride. By continuing the fight against Israel your subjects can feel that they are part of a noble effort that goes back to the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. and that has been, on balance, a tremendous success.

[Meerkat]

Excellent, albeit chilling, post Nicholas. I wonder if Jack is envious of the Enron guys' take?

I keep having this disturbing thought that the corporations are busily doing the national equivilent of breaking up the US. Pump up the stock market (fluff and dump), steal all the assets or ship them offshore (jobs, technology) and, viola, no more dominant US and we're the ones now living in old refridgerator cartons along the railroad tracks. The price of hubris and complacency.

[ 09-24-2003, 02:55 AM: Message edited by: Meerkat ]