bb
 

He didn't leave the Rs, we left him, in the dusty heap of history!




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Giuliani campaign announcement
 

Dude. We had no idea our SC state campaign chairman was a crack dealer.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine"

Does Carter really picture some evil U.S. empire sitting down around a table, like Doctor Evil and his cohorts in Austin Powers, deciding to "punish" an entire group including women and children? Carter is starting to sound like another international man of mystery:

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Those people
 

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

I'm not sure what he was trying to say, but I'm guessing it was something like this:

• Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not “sorted out their politics” — they’ve made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party’s power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force. . . .
  
  Back in January, I wrote:
  
  In the coming weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will cluck regretfully about the violence unfolding in the Palestinian territories as if the chaos in Gaza has as little to do with her as, say, the bizarrely warm winter weather in New York. And much of the U.S. media will concur by covering that violence as if it is part of some inevitable showdown in the preternaturally violent politics of the Palestinians. But any honest assessment will not fail to recognize that the increasingly violent conflict between Hamas and Fatah is not only a by-product of Secretary Rice’s economic siege of the Palestinians; it is the intended consequence of her savage war on the Palestinian people – a campaign of retribution and collective punishment for their audacity to elect leaders other than those deemed appropriate to U.S. agendas. Moreover, the fact that the conflict is now coming to a head is a product of Rice’s micromanagement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s political strategy – against his own better instincts.
  
  Rice’s siege strategy was premised on the belief that the economic torture of the entire Palestinian population would either force the Hamas government to chant the catechism of recognizing Israel-renouncing violence-abiding by previous agreements (again, Israeli leaders have to giggle at that one!) — or else, preferably, force the Palestinian electorate to recant the heresy of choosing Hamas as its government in the first place. Frustrated by the failure of this collective punishment to produce the desired results — and mindful of the need to quickly reorder Palestinian politics in order to satisfy the urgent need of the increasingly marginal Arab autocracies that Washington seeks to mobilize against Iran — she has stepped things up a notch, cajoling the hapless Abbas to take steps to toppled a government democratically elected only 11 months ago and beefing up the forces of the Fatah warlords dedicated to taking down Hamas in order to restore their own power of patronage.
  
  At about the same time, Conflict Forum reported on the aggressive campaign by White House Middle East policy chief Elliot Abrams to provoke a coup by Fatah against Hamas. The U.S. policy was to prevent a Palestinian unity government from forming, and once it was formed, the policy became to topple it. And Robert Malley and Henry Siegman warned that the White House policy failed to reckon with the fact that Fatah had been defeated politically, and would not be able to restore its leadership of the Palestinians through a putsch. Even if his forces could be boosted, they warned, “(they) will remain a far less motivated one (than Hamas), seen by many as doing America’s and Israel’s bidding. In such a contest, success is far from assured, as we should know from Iraq, Lebanon and, indeed, Palestine itself.”

Just guessing.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

Maybe. But when he lets slip, "The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine" and he's made similar slips in the past, I think he's just showing us his unfiltered feelings (which are quite irrational) on the issue. He's getting old and losing the filter. Grandma Keaton says the damndest things now. In the last few years, I've learned her true feelings on a lot of topics and they aren't pretty. She's like an uncheery Penske. NTTAWWT.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

so we should fund Hamas? while Billzabub was willing to allow the Taliban/AQ devil to live unfettered, even he never wanted to fund it.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

I don't think what he said about punishment is irrational. Although, as Hank points out, it's not like it's obvious what the best policy is. Something like 2/3 of the people in the West Bank are living on food aid. If you cut off everything going to the government now that Hamas is in charge, people are going to starve.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

He said the United States decided to punish Palestinians. Not that the U.S. made policy decisions that are going to harm people or keep them on "food aid." "Punish": to subject to or inflict a penalty; to mete out punishment. The idea that our government is spending billions of dollars in order to "punish" starving Palestinians on food aid is irrational.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

That would be irrational. I don't think that even Carter would say that spending billions on food aid would be punishment. Since you only quoted a sentence of what Carter said, I'm not sure what he meant, but you'll see in what I posted that the author has something different in mind as "punishment."

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

Withholding aid when the new government takes over seemed politically inevitable - even if someone thought it was the best policy, aiding a government run by Hamas just wouldn't have political support. For humanitarian reasons and to try to keep a lid on in general, you can re-route some portion of the humanitarian component through relief organizations and the UN (unless you're Bush and have a visceral dislike of all things UN), but sending any through Hamas is crazy. That said, the failure to use relief organizations and the UN to keep a lid on it has had a toll.

On the other hand, withholding tax revenues owed to the government strikes me as a simple treaty/international law violation.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

Based on his past slips, I think Carter has a problem thinking rationally on this issue. He clearly said that the U.S. and Israel made a decision and that decision was that they'd go and "punish all the people in Palestine." That's fucked up. This is a man who knows very well the difference between decisions to punish and well-meaning foreign policy decisions that go awry or harm people. If he thinks supporting or not supporting Hamas (or Fatah) is a good idea (or bad idea) - fine. But to say your country decided to punish an entire people is scary. He chose the words, not me.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

We decided to punish Israel in the same sense that the sanctions against Iraq were punishing that whole country. IIRC, Hank has explained this concept here, so I'll let him analogize to Gaza. Our policy promoted a deterioration in conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, in the hopes that it would turn Palestinians against Hamas.

I think you have a problem thinking rationally about Carter, NTTAWWT.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

Carter's full sentence "The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah"

Also, (from Pravda(!)):

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would "conquer Hamas in Gaza" - but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its "superior skills and discipline."

He said plans to reopen international aid to the West Bank, but clamp down on aid to Gaza, would imprison 1.4 million Gazans. He called for both territories to be treated equally.

"This effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples now is a step in the wrong direction," he said. "All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there's no effort from the outside to bring the two together."

Carter was pessimistic this would happen soon.

"I don't see at this point any possibility that public officials in the United States, or in Israel, or the European Union are going to take action to bring about a reconciliation," he said.

There's no need to slice up Carter's statements to take issue with the point he is making. He raises a legitimate question about whether "punishing" the Palis for electing (in an apparently reasaonble fiar election) Hamas is actually in the best interests of US, Israel and the EU. He also adds a layer of humanitarianism (I know, they're terrorists, nothing is too bad for them) to his consideration of the situation; disagree with it, fine, but it's a big part of what Carter was talking about.

And, in any case, it isn't "some evil U.S. empire sitting down around a table", it's just Dick Cheney, puppetmaster.

Rogue Ex Presidents
 

Have you seen Sicko yet?