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Showing posts from July 23, 2006

It’s a Local Battle, Not WWIII

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You might call it the American foreign policy establishment’s own form of Pavlovian Response. Whenever one people goes to war against another, in any part of the world, it arouses the interventionist impulse of politicians and pundits in Washington. And when that war happens to take place in the Middle East, the urge to “do something” acquires an almost apocalyptic urgency. Indeed, raising the specter of a Middle Eastern war in the Capitol is like shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater, as the experts warn that a hands-off approach towards a civil war or an inter-state confrontation in the region would risk a global war, an oil crisis and more terrorism. So it is not surprising that the current hostilities between Israel and guerrilla groups in Gaza and Lebanon have elicited a shrill response from lawmakers and talking heads seeking swift U.S. action. ‘This is, in fact, World War III,” former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich says about the crisis, in which the most powerful m

Bush should have read Quagmire

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That's what one reader has posted on amazon.com: Near prescience, July 18, 2006 Reviewer: TXPenguin (Texas) - See all my reviews If only George W. Bush had taken the time to read this book before he plunged the United States into the Iraq War! Hadar's 1992 prediction of disaster stemming from America's interventionist policies has come true. The civil war now raging in Iraq came about from the foolish neoconservative view that democracy could be successfully forced upon the Iraqi people. Hadar effectively refuted such ideas in this book. It is well worth reading especially today with proponents of American meddling in the Middle East planning further wars against Iran and Syria. I happen to agree...