World Focus — The Week in Review
By Charles Lemos on November 22, 2008 at 7:30 PM in Open Thread, World News
(This post is only for sober people. – nasuS yppinS)
Carla Robbins of The New York Times and Gideon Rose of Foreign Affairs magazine join Martin Savidge to discuss the weeks top stories: A new intelligence report suggesting al-Qaeda may be on the decline, the discussion over Senator Hillary Clinton as a potential member of the Obama cabinet and reports that Iran now has enough uranium to produce a nuclear bomb.
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Encouraged to see that Iran’s secretive build up to an arsenal of weapons isn’t going undetected…one has to wonder if the interest of the United States of America, a safe and secure Israel, is at stake with Iran’s focus upon weapons of mass destruction?!
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I will say it again..Iraq is a brilliant strategy!!
We have Iran surrounded on two sides. They have no intentions of stopping their nuclear ambitions. Right now they are building a shrine to Armhagenden and will facilitate the end of Israel if given a chance.
By being in Iraq we are preventing the final link in the Shitte crescent form Iran to Lebanon.
By being in Iraq we have stopped the advance of Russia
By being in Iraq we are potentially preventing world resource wars which will kill hundreds of millions of people.
I’m coming around to your way of thinking, Moss. Iraq looks like a piece of a bigger picture now. Interesting.
I always question people that go against popular opinion polls and what’s easy.
Bush is so dumb..He might be brilliant!
Truman was at the same unpopularity during his term. Looks like History treated Truman pretty good.
It will be a very weird irony if Bush and the Neo-Cons are proven correct on Iraq. I have to tell you–I was against this war from the start. But once you’re in, you can’t simply pickup your marbles and run home. So, Obama’s “historic speech” he claimed he gave, was completely naive from where I sit. But I am encourged that the surge has worked and that the war itself seems to be winding down. If the Iraqis can pull it out, set themselves on something of a semi-democratic track then we’ll have something to celebrate for them and us.
Was the human and treasure sacrifice worth it. I guess we’ll read the final analyses in the history books.
But it would be an amazing reversal of pc-think.
Seattle, you’re overreaching a bit. Syria is NOT a Shi’ite nation. Its Muslim population is predominantly Sunni with a large Alawi minority. (The Alawi share some Shi’ite traditions, but they’re a distinctive branch of Islam.)
Iraq, on the other hand, IS a largely Shi’ite nation. Some 60% of the total population of Iraq is Shi’ite.
Lebanon’s Muslim population is split among a number of sects, including Shi’ites and Sunnis, but none comprise a majority of the country’s Muslim populace much less its total population.
As for the “we have stopped the advance of Russia”, I honestly don’t get that. Russia FIRST has to regain all its former Caucasus republics (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), then bully both Turkey and Iran into one-sided arrangements with Russia. Russia will NOT enter any sort of reciprocal arrangement with the mullahs in Teheran for the same reason the Soviet Union refused to take any significant action against Iran: Too many Muslims living in the Russian Federation (you do know the name “Chechnya”, correct?) and the Russians can’t afford to have their various Muslim peoples become agitated into a religious frenzy. (As for Turkey, there’s that little obligation called NATO. There’s also that little Kurdish problem to deal with. A number of Iraqis wouldn’t mind letting go of the Kurds but that would just invite an invasion by Turkey which doesn’t want an independent Kurdish nation on its borders.)
Jozef..What I meant by Russia is this.
After the cold war America was in an omnipotent position to affect change to help protect the American sphere of influence. Russia was on the ropes so we invaded Iraq after the excuse which was 911. Iraq is now firmly in the American zone. This invasion could not have been pulled off unless the Russians were not in a weakened position. The Russians as a result have been shut out of influencing the middle east except for Iran.
We are now permanently in Iraq which has the infrastructure and oil which is denied Alqueda. The fact that these groups are left to pirating the seas says much about their desperation.
So why have I been happy lately.
Hillary is a Goldwater Republican that understands the systemic threats facing this country.
The left is angry that the HAWKS are back in..
More like Obama saw the briefings and will no longer pander to the left America hating crowd.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/3502411/Barack-Obama-accused-of-selling-out-on-Iraq-by-picking-hawks-to-run-his-foreign-policy.html
Isn’t it ironic how Hillary was marketed by the obama factions as being too weak and here they are now wondering if she is too strong.
Perhaps in actuality it evens out to: just right.
[...] World Focus — The Week in Review : NO QUARTER … A new intelligence report suggesting al-Qaeda may be on the decline, the discussion over Senator Hillary Clinton as a potential member of the Obama cabinet and reports that Iran now has enough uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. … [...]