RE: Margolis on the tail wagging the dog
Ken writes:>Certainly one could expect support for Israel as a strategic ally but how is Israel loyal when it deliberately ignores US presidential demands to withdraw. Israeli actions make a planned attack on Iraq much more difficult--by alienating all of Iraq's neighbours and also threatens stability in places such as Bahrain which are militarily important for the US.< I'm not convinced that the US really wants Sharon to pull the troops out. Instead, the US wants to _look like_ it want Sharon to do so. The problem with the Israeli actions that "make [the] planned attack on Iraq much more difficult" is that it's the nature of international relations (or of imperialism, for you guys) that events can't be predicted. No-one really knew that the Intifada would go the way it did, with people deciding not to give up passively to Israeli domination but to do so explosively. Then, I am sure that a lot of people in Washington DC are extremely sympathetic to Sharon's blitzkrieg. (Colin Powell was sent on a slow boat to the Levant rather than sped into impose his President's Diktat. That's because it wasn't really a Diktat. It was done for show.) Israel is a U.S. ally in the sense that it will never do anything against the U.S. directly and has done stuff in the past such as bombing Iraq. The Mossad works hand in glove with the CIA and seems to do its dirty work sometimes. (The US elite has been willing to forget events such as the bombing of the USS Liberty in 1967. This was at the start of the period when the US/Israel friendship deepened.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Margolis on the tail wagging the dog
Sabri, Put me in the anti-NATO camp and I'd send Milosevich home to Serbia if it were up to me, since they could sort it out far better. I'd say using the sort of reasoning which props up US foreign policy and the use of its deadly power, Milosevic has not only argued his case well but won it. Milosevic is far from the worst the 20th century gave us and he is on trial while many others who should be aren't. The irony is, had he been taken seriously in the first place, things would never have got so far out of hand. That's one problem with the 'imperial presidency' approach since the Reagan era. The US regimes think if they engage people they disagree with or dislike at a top diplomatic level (and the zealots at the State Department have a lot to do with this), not only does it raise their opponent, but it lowers the regal status of the office. And just look at that part of the world now. No wonder more and more living in the wreck of what was all of Yugoslavia are getting nostalgic. You never know what you had til you've lost it. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Etc. Etc. I'm sure I'll get bombarded with all sorts of statistics and analysis (probably from analysts at merchant banks, right) about what progress former Yugoslav countries are making, but I'll believe it when they are ready to host another Olympics. Charles Jannuzi
