The large-scale emergence of Iraqi “awakening” militias prepared to take on Al-Qaida played a much bigger role than the “surge” in dramatically cutting the violence, although a lot still goes on.
Hab, you haven’t answered my question - what have the Palestinians done to deserve seeing their homeland ripped away from them and handed to someone else?
“There really is nothing left for Israel to “give” for peace.” Well, how about allowing the refugees to return, if they so wish?
George W Bush made fundamental errors which created the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians - men, women and children - were killed (and are still being killed).
The Afghanistan invasion soon had Al-Qaida and Bin Laden on the ropes but instead of finishing the job properly Bush left a small, grossly inadequate US force to do the job while he switched to his main obsession - Iraq, which had played no part in the 9/11 attacks.
Al- Qaida was able to escape and regroup and Bush’s failure to invade Iraq without a coherent plan for what next left a huge vacuum into which a grateful Al-Qaida was able to step with the murderous results we saw in the years after the invasion.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Palestinians accounted for some 95% of the population of what is now the Gaza-Israel-West Bank region.
In all the huge amount of reading I’ve done on the subject over many years (I have a passion for history) I have yet to work out what it is the Palestine people have done to deserve having their lands, homes and jobs ripped away from them by the international community and handed over to another people.
It seems their crime was simply they were in the way.
And what of the Palestinian refugees who fled their homes in 1948, believing rightly or wrongly their lives to be in danger. Don’t they, too, have the right of return?
Capitalism and communism are the twin evils facing this planet. Both systems rely heavily on exploiting the misery and poverty of millions, if not billions of people around the world, just so that a rich, powerful elite can become even richer and more powerful.
As for climate change, I see the evidence as overwhelming that some sort of change is happening.
It may well be part of of a pattern stretching back millions of years. I’ve got no quibble with that. The point being that for the first time in Earth’s history humanity’s industrial activity has become part of the mix and it would be folly, bordering on criminality, not to try hard to lessen the worst effects of this obvious change.
The Second Amendment does not give citizens the right to bear arms, no matter what the Supreme Court says. Down the years the Amendment has been perversely misrepresented to favour the gun-making industry when all it really does is assume that in terms of the times, the late 1700s, there was need for “a well regulated militia”. It might even be argued that with such a strong standing army, such as the US has today, the Amendment is redundant.
Magnaut, there’s stacks of evidence that down the years various news agencies used faked photos to portray events in war zones, but where’s your evidence that AP faked their climate change emails investigation? Let’s see it.
AP News’s investigation into the emails controversy seems pretty thorough and convincing but I suppose it won’t stop people believing what they want to believe.
The large-scale emergence of Iraqi “awakening” militias prepared to take on Al-Qaida played a much bigger role than the “surge” in dramatically cutting the violence, although a lot still goes on.