Replies to post #20418 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[easymoney101]

we will be in deep dodo if Bush wins the election..thanks for the great eye opening articles

[F6]

(COMTEX) B: Israeli Says Country Will Become Isolated ( AP Online )

JERUSALEM, Oct 13, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Israel is set on a collision course with the European Union and could turn into a pariah state, like South Africa during the apartheid years, if the Mideast conflict is not resolved, Israel's Foreign Ministry warns in a confidential 10-year forecast.

The document, put together by the ministry's Center for Political Research, says the EU is pushing to become a major global player in the next decade, and as a result, the United States, Israel's main ally, could lose international influence. The forecast, written for internal consumption, was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The analysts wrote that if the EU, a 25-nation alliance, overcomes internal divisions and speaks in one voice, its global influence would grow considerably, and be more in line with its powerful economy.

A more influential Europe would likely demand greater Israeli compliance with international conventions and could try to limit Israel's freedom of action in its conflict with the Palestinians, the 25-page document said. Israel might also have to pay a price for growing competition between the European Union and the United States.

Israel-EU relations have long been shaky, and Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has repeatedly warned that Israel has to work to strengthen ties with Europe. However, Israel accuses the Europeans of pro-Palestinian bias and complains of a growing wave of anti-Semitism in parts of Europe.

EU officials in Brussels said that while the EU and Israel have sound relations in trade and scientific research, they have definite differences over Mideast peacemaking.

They also said the alliance is seeking more of a say. "Regarding the Middle East peace process and our relations with Israel and the Palestinians, there is no doubt that the role of the EU has increased," said Christina Gallach, a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

"We have had difficult moments (with Israel) when we responded to things like the West Bank wall and now what is happening in Gaza," Gallach said, referring to Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank and a major military offensive in Gaza.

The EU says Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 must be followed by major troop withdrawals in the West Bank, and pave the way for Palestinian statehood. "None of this is exactly what the Israelis want to hear, but we have to say it," Gallach said.

She said the Israeli government wants to broaden the relationship with Europe, without giving the EU a bigger role in resolving the Mideast conflict.

According to the Foreign Ministry document, which was written in August, Israel could become increasingly isolated in the coming years if Europe becomes more influential.

"In extreme circumstances, this could put Israel on a collision course with the European Union. Such a collision course holds the risk of Israel losing international legitimacy and could lead to its isolation, in the manner of South Africa," according to the document.

"The EU could sharpen its expectation that Israel will comply with international norms ... and honor the authority of the United Nations and its agencies - an issue that has the potential of leading to friction," the analysts wrote.

Israel has accused the United Nations of being biased against Israel.

Even if the EU fails to become a major international player, Israel will still become increasingly isolated if it fails to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, according to the document, which was also quoted in reports Wednesday by Israel Army Radio and the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In the best possible outcome, with the Mideast conflict moving toward solution, Israel and the European Union would still not be on good terms, the document said. "In almost every scenario, there is the potential for friction in Israel-EU relations," the analysts wrote.

Ron Prosor, director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, said Israel is investing a great deal in improving ties with the EU, especially in economic areas.

"The situation is not easy, but there is an investment here, especially in Europe, that is important to us all," Prosor told Israel's Army Radio.

Europe is Israel's major trading partner.

However, the Foreign Ministry analysts wrote that there is no substitute for Israel's close political alliance with the United States.

EU ambassador to Israel Giancarlo Chevallard wrote on the delegation's Web-site that when it comes to the Mideast conflict, Israel "tends to keep Europe at arms length and prefers to place all its eggs in the American basket."

By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI
Associated Press Writer

Copyright 2004 Associated Press, All rights reserved

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*** end of story ***

[F6]

Dear Anonymous

Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense, responds to the Salon article by Anonymous, "The State Department's Extreme Makeover."

Nov. 6, 2004 / To the editor of Salon.com:

A certain amount of interagency friction is inevitable given our open, democratic system of government. But the virulence of your recent article by "Anonymous," a "veteran Foreign Service officer currently serving as a State Department official," ("The State Department's Extreme Makeover, [F6 note -- the post to which this post is a reply]" Oct. 4, 2004) is (to borrow from the title) extreme.

"Anonymous" implies that he or she has personal knowledge of interagency work discussed in the article, but the descriptions are fundamentally inaccurate and credit conspiracy theories of a sort one finds in fringe publications. Given the depth of the animus Anonymous displays, one wonders how and, indeed, whether he could actually have participated in the government-wide work that he discusses.

The article contains too many factual errors to deal with in one letter, even if we leave aside various unpleasant personal remarks regarding my colleagues and me. For example, Anonymous asserts that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research "kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam's nonexistent WMD." However, as the Senate Intelligence Committee reported on July 7, 2004, with respect to both Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs, "Analysis from individual intelligence agencies ... was consistent between agencies and largely consistent with the [National Intelligence Estimate] and other [Intelligence Community] products ... " (pages 185 and 208). If State's intelligence bureau had dissented from the rest of the intelligence community on these key issues, it is hard to believe that the Senate Intelligence Committee would have overlooked that important fact.

An example of the nastiness and distortion of the article is the implication that the production, in 1996, of a paper on Israeli security policy would require those involved to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Anonymous is wrong both as to the facts of the matter (e.g., I was not a coauthor, let alone a "principal author," of the paper) and as to the law (e.g., merely publishing an open letter to a foreign leader does not constitute acting as a foreign agent.)

It would appear that Anonymous was either not involved with Iraq in any direct way, or he has no interest in factual accuracy, for he credits all the erroneous stories that have appeared in the press over the past year and a half. For example, he appears to believe that the State Department was cut out of postwar planning and policy: In fact, of the three main subordinates of Gen. Garner who dealt with substantive policy issues, two were from the State Department.

Anonymous claims that "State personnel are used to comings and goings of Democratic and Republican administrations, serving all equally and fairly." Fortunately for our country, this statement is true of almost all State Department officials. Unfortunately, Anonymous is not one of them.

Yours truly,

Douglas J. Feith
Undersecretary of Defense
Washington, D.C.

Copyright 2004 Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/11/06/feith/

[F6]

A state of chaos

George Bush has purged the last of his father's senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Guardian

The transition to President Bush's second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father's closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush's national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.

"Words like 'incoherent' come to mind," one top state department official told me about Rice's effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.

Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. "Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public," a state department source said.

Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but "he colourfully said he would not", a state department official told me. Rice's radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.

Bush has long resented his father's alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush "did not receive it well", said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush's 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: "Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush's conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: "Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age." And they wrote: "Although he never went public with them, the president's own father shared many of Scowcroft's concerns."

The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush's campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration's "overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare."

In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.

Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a "cakewalk", and that capturing Baghdad was "mission accomplished", are rewarded.

The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about "victory". Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

[e-mail]

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1380800,00.html

[F6 note -- if reviewing the post to which this post is a reply and preceding and (other) following, compare and contrast in particular Feith's reply to the post to which this post is a reply at http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=4619929 ]