Wow. Syria is one year older than Israel. Syria is a strict dictatorship that once killed 35,000 of its citizens in one night to supress a rebellion. Heretic, I don't mean to pick on you, but you are a prime example of many on this BBS that have no idea about the reality of the relationship between the Arabs and Israel. You people act as if dictatorships should have equal standing with representative democracies in world politics. In regards to this thread- OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE FAILED US!
Also, the Arabs know what a "WMD free Middle East" means. It means Israel disarming, and then going up in a mushroom cloud.
Not to pick on you John, but you appartently don't understand the Israeli-Arab relations and the history involved. I posted the link in another site, but Even David Ben-Gurion says that Israel was at least politically the aggressor, and this stuff was going on long before the war of 1948. The idea to live peacefully with Arabs was not the Zionist intention http://www.cactus48.com/statehood.html Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine "Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund...On December 19, 1940, he wrote: 'It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country...The Zionist enterprise so far...has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with 'land buying' - but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe'...There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists." Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine." "[At Lausanne,] Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians were trying to save by negotiations what they had lost in the war--a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israel, however... [preferred] tenuous armistice agreements to a definite peace that would involve territorial concessions and the repatriation of even a token number of refugees. The refusal to recognize the Palestinians' right to self-determination and statehood proved over the years to be the main source of the turbulence, violence, and bloodshed that came to pass." Israeli author, Simha Flapan, "The Birth Of Israel."
Why does Isreal need WMDs anyway? They defeated the Arabian armies on their own like what, six times in the past and now they have the USA backing them up. They have enough firepower to protect themselves but they want more, can't blame them, but that doesn't make them have rights to own WMDs while forbidding other neighbours to have it.
I want to say that i thought Macbeth post was brilliant. How in the world can people agree with the fact that Israel has mass destruction weapons, and syria shoudn't have them and also say they suported the war in iraq. i somethinmes really do not understand people. Why should al the countrys the usa like have al the weapons?? didn't the USA once suported Iraq?
Syria sucks: http://slate.msn.com/id/2081612/ Bashar Assad The evil moron who's running Syria. By Chris Suellentrop Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 4:22 PM PT Movies and comic books condition Americans to think in terms of the "evil genius," a dangerously insane but diabolically brilliant adversary who carefully and calculatingly plots to destroy the world. Think Lex Luthor attempting to obliterate the California coast, or the Joker scheming to poison Gotham, or the countless forgettable villains who have conspired to change the orbit of the moon in an effort to unleash destructive tidal waves that will destroy the Earth's major cities. For better or worse, this archetype has spilled out of the realm of fantasy and into the real world, coloring how Americans view nonfiction villains as well as fictional ones. As David Plotz pointed out more than a year ago in Slate, "We always put a face to our misery. And every so often, we anoint some foreign malcontent as the arch-fiend responsible for all our global difficulties." Before Saddam, Osama. Before Osama, Saddam. And so on. But there's one problem with this worldview: In the real world, most evil men aren't geniuses. Instead, the real danger, more often than not, comes from evil morons. Take Bashar Assad. Has there been a more disastrous geopolitical move in recent years than the 38-year-old Syrian president's decision to cast his lot with Saddam just prior to Iraq's stunning military defeat? Before the war, Syria had actually done quite a bit to improve its standing in the eyes of the United States. It cooperated in the war against al-Qaida, sharing the intelligence it gained from interrogations of Muhammad Haydar Zammar, the man suspected of recruiting Mohamed Atta to carry out the 9/11 attacks. In addition, Syria supported the Saudi plan for peace with Israel. And it may not sound like much, but Assad denounced the 9/11 attacks, while Saddam (less smartly) praised them. Now it appears that Assad may have gambled all of that away. By foolishly providing moral and materiel support to Iraq during the war—and, the administration says, now by harboring high-ranking Iraqi officials—he's created an environment that makes it possible for a Democratic presidential candidate (Florida Sen. Bob Graham) to openly support war with Syria. Already some hawks are pointing to the tantalizing parallels between Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. Weapons of mass destruction? Check. Support for terrorism? Check. Repressive domestic intelligence services? Check. The comparisons go further: Both countries were ruled by tyrannical men who are not members of the ethnic majority. (Saddam was a Sunni who ruled over a largely Shiite country, and Assad is an Alawite who rules over a Sunni majority.) To top things off, Syria even has a Baath Party and a Republican Guard. No one expects war anytime soon, but Assad's stupidity has put the subject on the table. When Assad came to power in June 2000, one week after the death of his father, Hafez Assad, many hoped that his ties to the West—the two years in London he spent training to become an ophthalmologist, his facility with English, his British-born Syrian wife—would make him a different kind of dictator. He was part of what Slate dubbed the "Arab Brat Pack," young rulers that were thought to be earnest technocrats, not ideological demagogues. But Assad's tenure as president has demonstrated that surfing the Internet doesn't make you a reformer. While Assad's Syria isn't as repressive as Saddam's Iraq, it's still the kind of place where democratic dissidents get jailed. Assad has also proven to be wildly and vocally anti-Semitic. Less than a year after coming to power, he declared that Israelis "try to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ and in the same way they tried to kill the prophet Muhammad." He also said the election of Ariel Sharon proved that Israel was "a racist society, even more racist than the Nazis." When he came under international criticism for the remarks, he remarked, "I was talking about Israelis, not Jews." Comments like those create the worry that Assad is not just pandering when he attacks the war in Iraq as a Zionist plot: He may actually believe it. Recently, the Jerusalem Post floated two other possibilities to explain Assad's head-scratching decision to support Saddam: Either Bashar is "not rational," or his plan is "designed not only to eventually tighten his grip on power in Damascus, but ensure the U.S. will not turn their smart bombs and bunker-busters on him next." In other words, Assad is either insane, or he's a genius. But there's a third possibility: He's rational, but he's also an idiot. Meaning, Assad believes he is acting in his own self-interest, but he's badly misjudged what his self-interest is. Saddam, after all, surely thought he was acting in his own self-interest all the time, too. But if he had been better at gauging what was actually his best course of action, he might not have invited two catastrophic wars with the United States upon his country and his regime. So, in the short run, you can see why Assad could think his gamble has paid off. His anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric has endeared him to both Arab nationalists and Islamic radicals in his country and in the region. "He's now the most important Arab leader," says Amatzia Baram, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Haifa. But if Assad is now the most popular figure in the Middle East among Arabs of an anti-American stripe, it's worth noting that before Assad, that figure was Saddam. For Assad's sake, and for ours, let's hope Assad is smart enough to remember how that turned out.
Drop the stick....nah.....won't happen. We poke em a bit they get in line, then we leave them. That is why our stick works. DD
DD, I hope you are kidding. I am sure the citizens of Rome thought their coffers were filled with infinite gold, then POW! they dropped the stick. OR the Zulu, Persians, Greeks, Turks, Japanese, Chinese, Mongols, Soviets, British, French, Germans, and Barbers/Moors/Arabs. They all were the super power at a time. Now look at them
Cndr, The difference is that Rome and the rest tried to conquer the world, we aren't interested in that. DD
arno, Since history is a good indicator, why not look to Japan, or Germany, or Italy? or any other nation we conquered and gave back their soverienty? DD
The USA is working on conquering the world. Maybe not on having the ground, But the way they are acting is like they own the world, if you act like this people wil start to dislike you. If you tell everybody that they should do what you want and tel them they should think what you think, or else. then in my opinion you are trying to control the world. So therefore i do believe the USA coud lose the stick. not soon, but they can.
