This board has been a little to quiet for while.

Is it time that Bush and Blair who is a close friend and confidant of Bush were tried for War Crimes?

Do you think the use by the American Administrations of renditions are War Crimes and committed with full knowledge of American and British leaders ie. Blair and Bush and they are ultimately responsible?

Also in the aftermath of the illegal invasion of Iraq are should their action seen to be as the provocation for the rising toll of British, American and Iraqi deaths.

As a result of the military intervention in Iraq do you think you are safer in Britain to-day?

Do you think one should expect government leaders and ministers who have been responsible for massive foreseeable casualties should visit the hospitals to meet the casualties they have produced directly or indirectly by their actions?

I had a look at the heading of this thread and wondered if I could change it to BABA's Rant or cut and page.

Failed as usual, but I am beginning to see the results I and others fore casted for IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN.

Why cannot the arch architects of the crazy policy be relieved of their posts and held responsible for their actions.

Is it time that Blair who is a close friend and confidant of Bush were tried for War Crimes? Treason/traitor ............

By DAVID RENNIE - The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 200

PARIS France's leading gynecologists have challenged hard-line Muslims to bow to France's secular, "modern" rules of society and to stop insisting that female doctors examine their wives.

The heads of the French National College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians issued a public declaration rejecting any moves to undermine the principle that public hospitals are part of a secular state in which patients must accept being examined by a doctor of the opposite sex.

The move came after a consultant in Paris was punched by a Muslim who was concerned that a male doctor wanted to examine his wife after complications in childbirth. Though incidents of gynecologists being attacked on religious grounds remain rare, the declaration said some Muslims' rejection of secular norms appeared to be rising.

The college said: "Thirty years ago, Muslim women came into our hospitals without any alarm at being taken into the care of doctors, most of whom were men, and there were none of these difficulties. Why are things going backwards? It is for Islam to adapt to the liberties that all must possess in a modern state."

France's health minister, Xavier Bertrand, wrote to the college offering support and expressing his "indignation" at assaults on doctors.

The French constitutional requirement of the separation of state and religious activities led to a law banning the wearing of "conspicuous religious symbols" such as the Islamic headscarf in schools.

21:00 Today
BBC2
Suez: A Very British Crisis
Second of a three-part drama-documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis tells the story of how British Prime Minister Anthony Eden secretly plotted with France and Israel, behind America's back, not just to seize back the Suez Canal but to remove Egyptian President Nasser as well. Shimon Peres, then head of the Israeli Defence Ministry, speaks about the secret meeting in France and Douglas Hurd, then a junior diplomat at the UN, recalls how Britain became totally isolated


Pretext, pretext, pretext ...

Instead of rants about the veil maybe our Islamic friends should condemn.....
or denounce the Islamic government of Sudan for the on-going genocide of hundreds of thousands of black Africans.
Or maybe the fathers who cut their baby daughter's genitals in the name of Islam, many hundreds of thousands per year!


The West is waking up to the dangers of Islam!

Regime change 1950s-style

"
...

History's verdict

Finally, how far was public opinion deceived?

This is a sensitive charge. All politicians make mistakes, but mistakes based on deception carry an added stigma.

den kept the truth about Suez not only from the Americans, but from members of his own cabinet.

Certainly today's British prime minister, Tony Blair, would resist any comparison between himself and Eden.

He would say he made an honest mistake in claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

His critics would say he "spun" the country into a war which achieved "regime change" but with disastrous consequences.

History's judgement on Britain's role over Suez has been damning.

It remains, to this day, a moment of shame - a warning to politicians and generals alike of the price to be paid for risky foreign adventures.

For history's verdict on the Iraq affair, we will have to wait a little longer."

BTW, the agreement with France and Israel which Britain signed remained a secret for over 40 years and became public only in the 1990's.

Fred, you might have to recreate this thread in 2050.

'The French constitutional requirement of the separation of state and religious activities led to a law banning the wearing of "conspicuous religious symbols" such as the Islamic headscarf in schools.'

Social cohesion and equlaity may be the intetion but it might be a difficult to enforce in practice. What are we going to do about people wearing crosses, scalp caps, turbans, have tatoos and those insisting on wearing helmets and very dark sunglasses indoors??

We feel a sense of inequality and arrogance, sometime danger, when we are unable to see the other person's eyes and faces in face-to-face communication.

Or on the other hand, do we need a minimal dress code, varied by gender, age, location, religion and culture?

(The recent case of the woman sunbathing naked in her garden, taken to court by the police, on complaint from her neighbour.)

AX, I will have to recreate myself first. Nobody else will want to.

fred, I hope you'll still be around then to create more threads of worthy debate and exchange of ideas :-)

IMHO, the existence of the signed agreement between Britain, France and Israel over Suez invasion had a profound influence over the British foreign policies and actions over the years.

Australian Muslim Cleric Suspended For Three Months



(RTTNews) - Australian Muslim cleric Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali has been barred from preaching for up to three months, after comparing scantily dressed women to "uncovered meat". al-Hilali's comments, suggesting that women who did not wear a headscarf attracted sexual assault, have spaked a wave of protest. Sydney's mosque association said the suspension would give the cleric time to consider the impact of his words.

However Australian Premier John Howard said the punishment was insufficient. Many people. including some Muslim leaders have called for the cleric to be dismissed from office. al-Hilali sparked more controversy on Friday when, asked by reporters if he would resign, he responded: "After we clean the world of the White House first."

Maybe muslims should look up to the likes of the man below instead of the mad mullahs and clerics!

The autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.

In 1974, Professor Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist from Chittagong University, led his students on a field trip to a poor village. They interviewed a woman who made bamboo stools, and learnt that she had to borrow the equivalent of 15p to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, sometimes at rates as high as 10% a week, she was left with a penny profit margin. Had she been able to borrow at more advantageous rates, she would have been able to amass an economic cushion and raise herself above subsistence level.


Realizing that there must be something terribly wrong with the economics he was teaching, Yunus took matters into his own hands, and from his own pocket lent the equivalent of 17 to 42 basket-weavers. He found that it was possible with this tiny amount not only to help them survive, but also to create the spark of personal initiative and enterprise necessary to pull themselves out of poverty.


Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus carried on giving out 'micro-loans', and in 1983 formed the Grameen Bank, meaning 'village bank' founded on principles of trust and solidarity. In Bangladesh today, Grameen has 1,084 branches, with 12,500 staff serving 2.1 million borrowers in 37,000 villages. On any working day Grameen collects an average of $1.5 million in weekly installments. Of the borrowers, 94% are women and over 98% of the loans are paid back, a recovery rate higher than any other banking system. Grameen methods are applied in projects in 58 countries, including the US, Canada, France, The Netherlands and Norway.


Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing: a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. 'Grameen', he claims, 'is a message of hope, a programme for putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long'. This work is a fundamental rethink on the economic relationship between the rich and the poor, their rights and their obligations. The World Bank recently acknowledged that 'this business approach to the alleviation of poverty has allowed millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity'.


Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why Muhammad Yunus believes that the right to credit should be recognized as a fundamental human right. It is this struggle and the unique and extraordinary methods he invented to combat human despair that Muhammad Yunus recounts here with humility and conviction. It is also the view of a man familiar with both Eastern and Western cultures on the failures and potential for good of industrial countries. It is an appeal for action: we must concentrate on promoting the will to survive and the courage to build in the first and most essential element of the economic cycle Man.


Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in Chittagong, the business centre of what was then Eastern Bengal. He was the third of 14 children of whom five died in infancy. Educated in Chittagong, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. In 1972 he became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank. In 1997, Professor Yunus led the worlds first Micro Credit Summit in Washington, DC.


Alan Jolis, co-author of Banker to the Poor, is an American journalist and writer, now living in Sweden. His books include Love and Terror, Speak Sunlight (a memoir of childhood) and several childrens novels. He is a contributor to Vogue, Architectural Digest, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and other periodicals.


If I could be useful to another human being, even for a day, that would be a great thing. It would be greater than all the big thoughts I could have at the university.


Muhammad Yunus


I only wish every nation shared Dr Yunus and the Grameen Banks appreciation of the vital role that girls and women play in the economic, social and political life of our societies.

US First Lady Hillary Clinton


By giving poor people the power to help themselves, Dr Yunus has offered them something far more valuable than a plate of food. He has offered them security in its most fundamental form.

Former US President Jimmy Carter

barwoni, excellent post 1199. If he is as described, then the world need more bankers like Muhammad Yunus.

Somewhat off topic in relation to Bush/Blair but the white collar crime issue is interesting.

Criminal justice system is good at catching small time crooks and the nation is hysterical about drugs issues, abducted children and social security fraud.

Somehow the billions that it costs the nation in white collar crime goes unnoticed or is even regarded as fair game. FSA has only ever made one prosecution.

MELTDOWN IN PAKISTAN

Reports from Pakistan indicate that institutions of the state are heading for collapse. There are powerful forces at work that may soon redraw boundaries in the region.


N.S. Rajaram

The ?Lawless Frontier? takes over

The Indian establishment, obsessed with the insurgency in Kashmir, appears to have totally missed the cataclysmic changes taking place across the border that may soon render the Kashmir issue all but irrelevant. Here is the reality: Pakistan is now a state on the verge of collapse. While world attention is focused on the so-called ?nuclear flashpoint? of Kashmir, the State of Pakistan is being overwhelmed by forces of history and geography. A state with less than a tenth the resources of India, Pakistan is forced to fight insurgencies on its frontiers perhaps ten times as great as in Kashmir. It is only a matter of time before the institutions of the state totally breakdown. And this is because of the fundamental irrationality of Pakistan, which is less a state than a turbulent frontier that a small Punjabi elite is attempting to hold together. This is the picture that emerges from a masterly study of the state of Pakistan written by Robert Kaplan, probably the world?s leading reporter on the region (?The Lawless Frontier?, The Atlantic Monthly, September 2000).

Here is what it means in simple terms: while world attention is focused on the proxy war in Kashmir, conflicts far more fierce and fundamental in nature are taking place in the borderlands of Pakistan ? in the Northwest Frontier, Baluchistan and even Sind. This has set the state of Pakistan on a course of irreversible dissolution. Here is the crux of the problem in Kaplan?s words: Osama bin Laden, and the fighting in Kashmir obscure the core issue of South Asia: the institutional meltdown of Pakistan?" And this is due to the accumulation of disorder and irrationality that is yet to be understood. And the jihad in Kashmir is a consequence of this fear of a crumbling state ? in the hope of providing a unifying theme to unite forces of the frontier that are implacably hostile to the Punjabi ruling establishment.

Of course border problems are nothing new, but in the case of Pakistan it is of an altogether different dimension. The reason is simple: Pakistan is made up mostly of border regions with a small Punjabi core. As Kaplan puts it: PAKISTAN covers the desert frontier of the Subcontinent. British civil administration extended only to Lahore, in the fertile Punjab, near Pakistans eastern border with India; its Mogul architecture, gardens, and rich bazaars give Lahore a closer resemblance to the Indian cities of New Delhi and Calcutta than to any other place in Pakistan. But the rest of Pakistan? the rugged Afghan-border regions of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, the alkaline wasteland of Sind, and the Hindu Kush and Karakoram Mountains embracing Kashmir ? has never been subdued by the British or anyone else." It is a small chunk of India latched on to a huge and hostile border region. It is a total mismatch.


Disorder and irrationality

This might be an oversimplification but his basic insight is valid: Pakistan is made up of a vast desert frontier with a small Punjabi core. This unruly desert frontier is what a Punjabi elite and a sprinkling of Mujahirs like Genral Musharaf are trying to rule, while holding up Islam as the unifying force. But this has not made the people on the frontier hate them any less, for Islam always has led to divisions with each side claiming the other to be less pure. Pakistan?s answer to this encirclement was to create the Taliban through which to control Afghanistan itself. This was facilitated by the war in Afghanistan, which the CIA financed and Pakistani ISI managed. This obscured for a while the fundamental irrationality and the chaos that is inherent in the makeup of Pakistan. The flow of foreign money, especially during the Afghan War, obscured also its economic fragility? of the small productive Punjab trying to support the vast unruly and unproductive frontier. The Cold War and the Afghan War gave Pakistan an exaggerated sense of importance. Pakistani leaders and the elite failed to recognize that they were needed only to do a dirty job that Americans didn?t want to do themselves.

To compound this folly, Pakistan has now embarked on a course of destabilization of India itself. It is difficult to see how an unstable India helps Pakistan any more than an unstable Afghanistan does. But today Pakistan is a state that is distinguished not by reason but dogma, beginning with its geography. Its belief in Islam as the solution to all its problems has led it to define itself as the Jihad state par excellence in the world today. It has made it also the most despised country in the world. It sees spreading terror as its salvation. This bespeaks a mind stupefied by religious dogma to a point beyond reason and logic. This is Talibanism pure and simple.

This has now come back to haunt it in the form of Afghan refugees and lawlessness on a scale that has overwhelmed the Pakistani establishment. The problem is rooted in history and geography of the region. Foreign aid and rescheduled payments can only prolong the agony; they cannot alter the geo-strategic reality or the inherent irrationality of Pakistan?s composition. It is also independent of who is in power? the military or a civilian government. The frontier tribes recognize neither. Nor do they care to be ruled by plainsmen from the Punjab? be they Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or the British. This is the basic force of history that the Punjabi ruling elite calling itself Pakistan is fighting against. The outcome of the struggle is a foregone conclusion. It follows a historic pattern: a weak state in the Punjab has always succumbed to forces from the northwest. A strong state of which Punjab is a part has always turned back the invader. So the only hope for its Punjabi heartland to survive is to be part of the strong state of India.

With such mighty forces at play, it is clear that a Punjabi-Mohajir elite in a slender sliver of land cannot hope to control a vast and ?lawless frontier?? as Kaplan puts it. The only natural boundary between this frontier-land and the plains is the Indus River, which leaves Pakistan with no strategic depth. The question then becomes one of survival? not exercise of authority. It also shows the futility of India placing trust in any Pakistani leader, in the hope of achieving peace in the region. No leader can control either geography or the forces of sectarian hate and violence that dominate the region. It is only a matter of time before the state crumbles under the weight. When that happens, all of Pakistan will become a ?lawless frontier?. The only institutions left in Pakistan will be the madrasas ? or Islamic schools ? that turn out something like half a million ?students? a year fit for nothing except jihad. Their first targets will the elite at home. They are already running the state in Afghanistan and much of Pakistan. Left unchecked, they will soon control all of Pakistan. The consequences for the region can be cataclysmic, and India should prepare for the inevitable outcome.




Jihad vs. appeasement

So here is what India will be faced with in the not too distant future. The state we now call Pakistan will be whittled down to Punjab and the regions east of the Indus River, struggling to protect itself from the forces of unruly frontiers controlled by warlords great and small in search of loot. This is what institutional meltdown will amount to. By one of those coincidences of history, this institutional meltdown in Pakistan is paralleled by a meltdown in the Indian intellectual establishment. It is a sobering reminder of the bankruptcy of the Indian (Leftist) intellectual establishment that this fundamental analysis of the problem of Pakistan and its consequences comes from a Western reporter in far off America and not anyone in India.

The behavior of the Indian intelligentsia may be compared to Nero fiddling when Rome was burning; they would rather carry candles to the Wagah border and ask for appeasing the Pakistani establishment than inform the public with a realistic appraisal of the primal nature of the forces of fear and hatred that are burning across the border. It is an unhappy fact that the Indian intelligentsia has offered little more than appeasement of hostile forces in one guise or another. It is worth recalling that Gandhiji himself failed with his appeasement policy, not once but repeatedly, beginning with the Khilafat Movement and ending with the Partition. Kuldip Nayar, for example, who has become the leading spokesman for appeasement, is unlikely to succeed where Gandhiji failed. The breakdown of reason in Pakistan is paralleled by a similar breakdown in India. The dogma of Jihad has its counterpart in the dogma of appeasement. Fortunately their days are numbered. The meltdown in Pakistan will consume its advocates in India also. What is needed therefore is a new way of looking at the problem? one rooted in ground realities rather than fantasy.


Geo-strategic reality

The first point to note is that Pakistan will not crumble quietly. It is too steeped in hate and violence to disappear like the Soviet Empire. More likely, it will be like former Yugoslavia. Eventually the land beyond the Indus will return to being the frontier that it has always been, and the Punjabi-Mohajir colony calling itself Pakistan will be struggling for survival. Its enemy will not be India but the Talibanized network of ?schools? and its hate-filled ?students? trying to undermine and even destroy the Punjabi elite. To see what will be like, one has only to look at what happened to the Afghan elite after the Taliban took over. And in Punjab the hostilities are infinitely greater. They are rooted in the historic hostility of the frontier nomads towards the settled people of the plains. Appeal to Islam will not save them, for what the Punjabis are up against is the geo-strategic reality of the region. And this is what has shaped their history. And they have made the situation worse by creating and sponsoring the Taliban.

Here is the historic pattern previously alluded to. Whenever there was a weak state in the Punjab region, it has fallen before invaders from the northwest. This was the case when it was invaded by Darius, Muhammad of Ghazni, Timur, Babar and Nadir Shah. On the other hand, whenever the Punjab was part of a powerful state, it has turned back the invader. This is what happened when the Greeks, the Huns and Afghans in the time of Ranjit Singh tried to invade the planes. (Incidentally, history books are wrong in claiming that Alexander was victorious. It was as much a disaster as Napoleon?s march on Moscow. This is clear from early accounts. But British controlled textbooks presented it otherwise, to emphasize European superiority. The correct perspective was provided by the great Russian general Marshal Zukhov. Alexander?s troops mutinied, and he himself died a year later broken in health and spirit.)


To save Punjab

Saving Punjab is as much India?s responsibility as it is Pakistan?s. India cannot let these invading forces cross the Indus and turn West Punjab into a wasteland. The only way for Punjab to survive is to let the frontier be frontier and rejoin India? its natural home. But is the Punjabi ruling elite capable of such vision? As one Pakistani (Punjabi) journalist told Kaplan, We have never defined ourselves in our own right ? only in relation to India. That is our tragedy." This attitude represents a historic truth: Punjab is India or it is happy hunting ground for the frontier tribes. If the Punjabis do not cure themselves of their hatred, it may soon lead to an even greater tragedy? of Afghanistan consuming Pakistan itself. Punjabis should see for themselves that Pakistan is a fantasy that died the day Bangladesh broke away. They should also recognize that the Punjabis never asked for Pakistan; the people who planted that poison seed remained in India. And the same people ? of the Deoband School of Lucknow ? planted also the poison seed that grew to be Taliban.

The choice for the Punjabis of Pakistan is clear. Forces of history and geography are against them. They can return to their natural home in India as the proud citizens of a great power or continue their sordid existence as a client state that can be hired by a patron whenever a dirty job needs to be done. But even this is precarious and short-lived existence. For all its bombast, Pakistan ? its Punjabi core at least ? is today little more than a buffer state between India and the violent frontier. Once they become part of India, they will have a great power to defend them against the hordes. One hopes they recognize the inexorability of the logic: it is India or oblivion, there is no middle ground.

For India the option is clear. Pakistan as it exists today is facing a meltdown. Changes of government and leaders will not turn back the elemental forces now in play. And negotiations and treaties with a melting state are meaningless. As India becomes a great power, the Pakistani Punjab and the land east of the Indus River will inexorably be drawn into India. And the Indus River will again be its natural boundary. There will be many challenges, but the goal is clear: to minimize the damage and destruction during this historic reunion, which I now feel is inevitable. In summary, India can no longer afford the luxury of being a soft state, continuing to avoid hard decisions and actions. A soft state at this critical juncture in history may also face a meltdown like Pakistan.

______________

N.S. Rajaram is a historian of science who has written extensively about Islam.

http://voi.org/books/

I wonder why Blair and his cohorts didn't want a debate and enquiry into the Iraq war.

What a spineless Labour party we have supporting this government which is unprepared to look at and discuss their mistakes. (I know the conservatives always used other peoples' spines but the level this government has sunk to beggars belief.)

I suppose they are more interested in their pensions and present salaries.

I can see a hung parliament in a few years time. I would prefer a hanging in parliament.

Fred,

There was never a chance the motion will get carried. As one commentator says
"what we are watching is pure politics at play.". Iraq wasn't a mistake.
Certainly felt less safer now than before the invasion.

Agrees 100% on ... "they are more interested in their pensions and present salaries.".
What examples they've set.

A hang parliament will be a change for the better ... what is the name of the ex-prostitute Italian MP? Perhaps she can stand for election in the UK. I am serious considering voting for the Monster Raving Party in the next election.

More death from our peace loving friends!!!!

Wedding bomb toll climbs to 23From correspondents in Baghdad
November 01, 2006 07:14pm
Article from: AAPFont size: + -
Send this article: Print Email
THE death toll from a car bomb attack on an Iraqi wedding party has climbed to 23, including 19 children aged under 10, the manager of the hospital that received the bodies said today.

A car bomb exploded early today outside a family home hosting a wedding reception in the north Baghdad district of Ur, just as the bridegroom's party was arriving in a convoy of cars.

Qasim Modalal, director of the Imam Ali hospital, told AFP that 23 people were killed in the blast - including 19 infants - and that another 19 were wounded, many of them seriously.

Baghdad is in the grip of a vicious sectarian war between rival Sunni and Shiite extremist factions, despite a massive security operation that has 15,000 US troops and more than 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and police on the streets.

Nice to see that this post has run its course. we have gone from the title of this thread and dissapeared off at numerous tangents and come back again. After reading the majority of posts its great to see that my original opinions have not been swayed by the numerous rantings of press educated posters.
I do and always will, i think, believe that were perfectly justified in going into Iraq. The WMD was removed and im glad to hear, is about to be hung.
Yes the Blair project lied to us, yes there should have been a correct exit plan, and yes some missiles did miss thier targets. Such is life.
There have been numerous claims about links of Saddams generals and indeed government, to different terrorist organizations, and in some cases these have been proved.
The facts are as simple as people want to make them.

Was Saddam a threat to world peace - YES
Was He and his government sponsoring terror - YES
Was he developing chemical weapons - YES
Did he murder thousands of his own people - YES
Was it right to take him out - YES

SIMPLE REALLY

I think the only Bush and Blair hold on to delusions as strongly as you. The American electorate have woken up and realise the Bush had his own agenda and is now being rejected. I think that Blair and unfortunately the Labour party ( because of the moral cowardice in not removing their tainted leader) will also pay the price for lying to the public.

The history of war leaders is one of removal after the conflict, regardless of the outcome. Think of dear old Winnie.
FWIW I agree with marc. The world is not any more dangerous than it was before, it is safer than it was. The middle east in general is safer, and the problems in Iraq were always coming whether Saddam was removed by might or old age.
Had we not shown strength in the face of Saddam, what brakes could we possibly apply elsewhere??? Korea is going down a treacherous path. If we had buckled under Saddam, then we would have no threat to hold over them. They would know it was bluff. As it is, I believe the best hope for a resolution in that area is for a negotiated settlement, but failing that we will have to use force. The knowledge that we will use force may be enough to prevent them going too far. The knowledge that we would postulate and pull out at the last moment would not deter them.
Alan