I wonder if

[question everything]

- Israel had managed to wipe out Hezbollah at one fell swoop, whether the entire world, including Arab nations (but not many DUers), would have felt a great sense of relief and gratitude

- A Democratic President, take you pick: Kerry, Kucinich, Clark, Dean - were taking the same stand about the current conflict - and he would have, don't kid yourself - whether many DUers would have changed their affiliation to Nader. How many DUers are on the side of Hezbollah "the army of god" just because Bush is against it? How can DUers who are against the influence by Christian fundamentalists support Muslim ones?

Yes, Bush is doing the right thing and as a liberal friend of mine commented: even a stopped watch is correct twice a day.

Last, a public Thank You to our favorite moderator, the Magistrate, who locked a flame out thread... under his own name. Thank you sir, for trying to keep discussions here civil and factual.

[Orrex]

1. Bush is a stopped digital watch

And we all know how often they're right.

[Nickster]

2. So unless I blindly support Israel and everything they do....I'm then a

supporter of Hezbollah? I reject the premise of your statement.

No Dubya is not doing the right thing. Standing by and twiddling your thumbs and refusing to talk to the parties that could stop the killing of innocent civilians is not the right thing and will never be the right thing.

"A liberal friend of mine..." I swear that I've heard that kind of lead in before...Hmmmm....

[TahitiNut]

5. Yep. It's the continuing false dichotomy. (Fallacies abound!)

:shrug:

[question everything]

9. No, you are not.

Until last year Israel has done everything wrong in handling the occupied territories. Territories, BTW, that most DUers choose to ignore, were captured as a result of attacks by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. And Israel should have never encouraged settlements in the territories.

And not much could have been done with Arafat as the negotiating partner with his corruption and ineffectiveness.

But once he was out of the picture, and his widow given the millions that were given to the Palestinian people, Israel was on the way to mend its way - better late than never, don't you think?

It withdrew from Gaza last year, so now "free Gaza" has been shelling Israel, digging tunnels into Israel proper and kidnapped and killed Israeli soldiers.

Similarly, Israel withdrew from Lebanon six years ago. Yet it is being attacked from a sovereign country (more or less).

Both Hamas and Hezbollah are not interested in negotiation. They do not want Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 war, they do not want it to withdraw to the 1947 partition borders. They just want to eliminate it altogether. And Hezbollah's Nassralla said that he wished all the world Jewry were in Israel, as it would "save" him the trouble of going after them world wide. This is not anti-Israel, this is anti-Semitism and I have yet to read as single DUer commenting on this.

But there has been on DU a Pavlovian negative reaction to anything that Israel does. All the Republicans need to do, come November, is to gather a handful of posts here with their hateful toward Israel and we can kiss any hopes of winning good bye.

[DYouth]

14. DU's wing of "love it or leave it"

although they apply that standard only to a foreign country (israel) and not our own. Queer to say the least.

[Wonk]

3. "don't kid yourself"

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were simply ignorant and not intentionally lying.




House Resolution 450, proposed by Dennis Kucinich and backed by 23 other members so far:

link

Calling upon the President to appeal to all sides in the current crisis in the Middle East for an immediate cessation of violence and to commit United States diplomats to multi-party negotiations with no preconditions.

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--
(1) calls upon the President to--
(A) appeal to all sides in the current crisis in the Middle East for an immediate cessation of violence;
(B) commit United States diplomats to multi-party negotiations with no preconditions; and
(C) send a high-level diplomatic mission to the region to facilitate such multi-party negotiations;
(2) urges such multi-party negotiations to begin as soon as possible, including delegations from the governments of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt; and
(3) supports an international peacekeeping mission to southern Lebanon to prevent cross-border skirmishes during such multi-party negotiations.





Edited to fix link.

[question everything]

10. Thank you, I stand corrected.

And yet, when individuals are in the minority and appeal to their constituents, they would often say one thing, and once they get the power they realize that they have to compromise with others. This is politics.

Thus, Kucinich may be now against what Bush is doing, but I have no doubt that had he been in the White House, he would have taken different steps. Obviously, we will never know, and he knows and it was a good way to generate headlines.

[atreides1]

4. My take

- Israel had managed to wipe out Hezbollah at one fell swoop, whether the entire world, including Arab nations (but not many DUers), would have felt a great sense of relief and gratitude

Some other group, perhaps a Syrian/Iranian supported PLO would have taken its place. You forget that
Hezbollah was a compilation of smaller groups, and that it took time to become a cohesive force.
Not sure how Arab nations would have felt at the time, they would have had a public view and a private view, just like they do now.


- A Democratic President, take you pick: Kerry, Kucinich, Clark, Dean - were taking the same stand about the current conflict - and he would have, don't kid yourself - whether many DUers would have changed their affiliation to Nader. How many DUers are on the side of Hezbollah "the army of god" just because Bush is against it? How can DUers who are against the influence by Christian fundamentalists support Muslim ones?

It's good to know that some people can read the future and have the ability to know what someone else
will do when put into a situation. I don't believe that any of the men you named would be against an immediate ceasefire, so that civilian casualties could be avoided. I doubt if any DUers would have changed their affiliation to Nader.

I don't believe that many DUers are on the side of Hezbollah, most seem to be concerned about the lives being lost, which should be a major concern of all, but it isn't. Where have you read that any DUers are supporting Muslim fundamentalists? I know I don't, nor do I support Hezbollah.

But in the same light I don't support Israel either, if their attacks had been solely on Hezbollah
strongholds, while I still would not support them, I could understand. But Hezbollah does not control the airport, Hezbollah does not control the city of Tripoli, and Hezbollah does not control all the infrastructure in Lebanon, but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference.




"Yes, Bush is doing the right thing and as a liberal friend of mine commented: even a stopped watch is correct twice a day"

So, if Bush was right about this, then he could be right about Iraq?

[question everything]

12. Hezbollah does not control the infrastructure

but this is how it got its missiles from Iran through Syria.

As Nassralla himself admitted, this was planned for four months. I don't think that you can put a Katusha rocket in one's briefcase. Not tens of thousands of them. So, yes, the roads and the airport had to be destroyed to, first, prevent the transfer of the kidnapped soldiers to Syria or Iran and to prevent replacement ammunition.

And while all of us mourn the loss of innocent lives, should we really mourn the loss of "things?"

In hindsight Bush was right about Iraq... until the fall of the government.

Once talks about reconstruction started, the White House should have allowed all bidders including the ones from France and Germany, but they were snubbed.

Soldiers from other Arab countries should have been called to keep the peace to allow for transition. With soldiers sharing language, history, religion and culture, they would not have been perceived as invaders and we would have withdrawn at that time. But, of course, when there was no Al Qaeda, no WMD, not even Regime change, what was left was the ugly desire for the Iraqi oil.

[Wonk]

6. Irony kick for question_everything's "don't question Bush on this" thread

:eyes:

[Wonk]

7. Paging 'question everything'. QE to the white courtesy phone please.

:eyes:

[Igel]

8. I think the Arab response would have been weird.

Very weird, indeed.

Hezbollah's victory created an odd sense of pride and loathing: they're Arab, so that was good, and they were perceived to have whupped aggressor Zionist-Entity tail. But they're Shi'ite, and that's not so good, and were formed, funded, and all but owned by the Shi'ite-theocracy-exporting non-Arab Iran and secular-yet-Alawite-Shi'ite Ba'athist Syria.

Have Hezbollah wiped out, and you don't just invert the picture: humiliation at an Arab defeat, but ok with the idea of a Shi'ite defeat. Because when it comes to defeat by the wrong people, as far as some believers go they're then all just Muslims. And, after all, they'd have been defeated by the Zionist pig-people. (And if you really need the 'sarcasm' tag, there's no helping.)

The humiliation at an Arab defeat would have been near universal. Relief at the loss of a Shi'ite militant group would have been mixed: the more pragmatic the leaders, and more secular, the happier--except for Syria.

Lebanon would have also had a mixed reaction, along the same lines, IMHO.

[oberliner]

11. Dems Right, Bush Wrong

As John Kerry said, if he was president we wouldn't have ever reached this point.

If Howard Dean was president, we wouldn't have reached this point.

If Wes Clark was president, we wouldn't have reached this point.

Each of them would have been working WITH the international community for the past year and a half since Israel withdrew from Lebanon helping to make it possible for the government of Lebanon to take concrete action towards getting Hezbollah to disarm.

President Kerry, President Dean, President Clark and any number of Democratic presidents would have used DIPLOMACY (a word, like many words, not in Bush's vocabulary) to deal with this issue before it became a crisis.

That's the difference. And it's a critical one.

Bush was not right in any of this.

[DYouth]

13. You can't wipe out a massive political organization in "one fell swoop"

How many Lebanese would they have to kill for that? Something like 100,000?