[Telegraph]Syria will be 1st rogue state to get Barack Obama charm offensive

any thread mentioning lebanon or syria without pics of hot lebanese and syrian girls fails miserably

so this thread is fail

 

I wasn't trying to be racist but have you been to lebanon? There's plenty of Good Christians and Muslims. The MAJORITY of the people are exactly as my girlfriends parents described it. The Christians are smaller well off families who pride themselves in educating their children who then go on to lead better lives while the muslims for the MAJORITY have multiple children and do not educate them and leave them to do whatever. That is why terrorist groups prey on them. In case you didn't christians don't exactly like the state of Israel either but you don't see them blowing themselves up, that's because they're educated for the MAJORITY and understand that you will not be dying for a noble cause because if you were your leader would be out there killing himself alongside you. It wasn't a racist comment just stating facts of the region, ask someone who is from there or has seen it with their own eyes.

 

Bathrooms with holes in the ground instead of toilets are not uncommon, even in the first world. France has bathrooms like that -- and they also often have tipjars for the cleaning crew -- and they aren't exactly 'oppressed.'

Also, I believe the Lebanese government is specifically divided by religion - the president is Christian, the PM a Sunni, and the head of Parliament a Shi'a. Muslims have significant influence in politics in Lebanon; they happen to be more moderate, like Turkey.

And, please add some punctuation.

 

And don't forget the Druze! Lebanon is really a polyglot country in so many ways. I was lucky enough to visit Beirut in the 1960's, before the '67 war, and it earned the "Paris of the Middle East" title. Agree about the "bathrooms." It's beyond absurd to judge a country by their toilets. They vary around the world and within countries. What we have here is more the exception than the rule.

 

No...I didn't. We are waging a war on terror. At the time the war started, even the IRA was considered fair game if they started acting up again.

I never said anything limiting it to radical Islam. You filled in those blanks in your head. That is your fault and your misgiving.

 

So we should not have diplomatic relations with Ireland now because they are, to use your words "built upon the terrorism we are waging war on"

Stop digging....

 

I'd like to see Obama and Ottri settle this over a pick-up game of 21.

 

Of course, the Irish government never endorsed the actions of the IRA.

You made an assumption that was invalid, and now you have decided to dig in your heels.

You're starting to slip Sam.

 

lol. such a sweet kid.

 

This line was priceless.


"They don't even have toilets at the airport they have holes in the ground and people sell you toilet paper you have to pay for."


By all means... let's base our foreign policy on the airport toilets of our adversaries! And to pay for toilet paper. Free toilet paper is a human right that must not be infringed upon!!

 

has he ever been to a middle school bathroom? good luck finding toilet paper.

 

I get it. Your statement wasn't racist because it's true. I didn't realize that you were able to meet the MAJORITY of Lebanon's 4.1 million people while you were there on vacation. But since you did, you can definitely make statements about the majority of the nation's Muslims being horrible parents.

By the way, I hope your grammar was much better in that essay you wrote on Lebanon than it has been in your posts.

 

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.93cd29fb2714a7b91e94a5dcabcde606.1b1&show_article=1

US President Barack Obama has already used experts within the last few months to hold high-level but discreet talks with both Iran and Syria, organizers of the meetings told AFP.
Officially, Obama's overtures toward both Tehran and Damascus have remained limited.

In an interview broadcast Monday, Obama said the United States would offer arch-foe Iran an extended hand of diplomacy if the Islamic Republic's leaders "unclenched their fist."

Meanwhile, his secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned that the Israeli-Syrian track of the Middle East peace negotiations took a back seat to the Israeli-Palestinian track, especially because of the recent war in Gaza.

However, even before winning the November 4 election, Obama unofficially used what experts call "track two" discussions to approach America's two foes in the region.

Nuclear non-proliferation experts had several "very, very high-level" contacts in the last few months with Iranian leaders, said Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the US branch of the Pugwash group, an international organization of scientists which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in Obama's election campaign, participated in some of these meetings focused on "a wide range of issues that separate Iran from the West: not only their nuclear program but the Middle East peace process, Persian Gulf issues," Boutwell told AFP.

The Pugwash official declined to name the other participants, except to say they had considerable clout.

"We had very, very senior figures from both the Iranian policy establishment and from the US; people who have very close, good access to the top leaders in both countries," Boutwell said.

"The Cable," the blog of the specialist magazine Foreign Policy, said Iran's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was "among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues."

Meanwhile, a group of experts under the auspices of the think tank, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), announced Thursday that they met for more than two hours in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The experts included Ellen Laipson, a former White House adviser under president Bill Clinton and a member of the Obama transition team.

Assad struck positive notes, the participants in the meeting said during a press conference at the Washington headquarters of USIP, a bipartisan think tank financed by Congress.

"His phrasing was 70 percent of our interests are potentially shared and 30 percent are not. And he said: let's work on the 70 percent," said Bruce Jentleson, who was the disarmament advisor to former vice president Al Gore.

The Syrian president himself revealed on Monday that "dialogue started some weeks ago in a serious manner through personalities who are close to the administration and who were dispatched by the administration."

The United States accuses Syria of supporting "terrorist" groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, of destabilizing Lebanon and of allowing armed men to transit its territory to fight US-led forces in Iraq.

Washington and Tehran, which have had no diplomatic ties for nearly 30 years, differ sharply over Iran's nuclear program. Washington charges the program is a covert military one, but Tehran says it is for nuclear energy.