"In creating healthy 'tissue' the 'disease' can be isolated and eventually destroyed. I'm optimistic it will occur, after the inevitable pain and the sacrifice all the developed (and developing) nations will need to take."

Continuing with your metaphors, chemotherapy can be just as devastating to a 'patient' and so can a heart bypass - possibly resulting in earlier fatality than nature's course. Before undertaking such invasive surgery, there is usually a great deal of shared understanding between ALL the people involved as to risks etc...

The healing here may take considerably longer because of the arrogance of the physicians. Having caused so much pain, without due consideration or dialogue, it may be time to remove them from the picture? What’s the point of using the same 'old' medicine if it has already been shown to exacerbate the problem?

Why do you guys insist on knocking people of other creeds?

Are you so impoverished that you need someone to feel superior to? Obviously the reverse must be true - ipso facto - you still command the low ground.

But do get your facts straight:

1. 9-11 was done by Wall Street money launderers and insurance shonks.

2. 7-7 was another wargame that went "live" - do your homework:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3770877779111334563&q=label%3Alondon+bombings

3. The skilled bombmakers of the IRA turned out to be the moles that MI5 planted. But then, if you knew anything about Ireland at all, you would know something of Martin Ingram and The Force Research Unit - do your homework:

http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/fru23022k1b.html

4. There is NO civil war in Iraq. There IS a popular insurgency. In addition there are the militias (E Timor style) who have been armed and funded by the occupying forces, to thwart that insurgency. The militias are the jailbirds who were released by Pasha Paul Bremer - do your homework.

* * *

C'mon guys. Lets raise the standards around here.

- and Davo! What is the point of our efforts if you are going to insist on staying in that rut? Drink deep from the well of truth mate - that's Holy Water.

Article in West Australian - Thursday October 5

US Diplomatic Strains in Middle East shown
during Arabic meeting with Condoleeza Rice.

Leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qater, Oman, and Bahrain reiterate to Dr Rice that the root of all problems in the ME is the Arab-Israeli conflict. They also question whether the Bush admin’ still has the energy and full commitment to really solve the Palestinian-Israeli issue before next year?

The concerned look on the face of Dr Rice shown in the coloured camera-shot while talking to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Geit after the outcome seems to say it all.

But not quite, the joyous look of relief on Condy’s face while being hugged by the Israelis just across the border in a later TV shot really completes the depiction of the rapidly failing US diplomacy in the Middle East.

Maybe there are some of us who might agree that Condy’s happiness with the Israelis is all for the good in the Middle East. But taking the Arabic side we others believe that it only increases the gravity of the situation. Also so many of us are getting scared to suggest that much of the hatred between the Arabs and Israelis, did increase after the US did help Israel manufacture atomic weaponry in the late 1970s.

It has lately got to the stage behind the scenes with suggestions to allow Iran to go nuclear to match Israel - creating a Bismarckian power balance which certainly helped to calm down India and Pakistan who both had gone atomic within a couple of years of each other.

Yet what lies ahead in this troublesome world, heaven knows? Maybe we could do with a Gandhi, a Mandela or even a Gorbachev?

Chris Shaw:
Davo may have been drinking holy water, but judging by your ramblings-you have obviously been imbibing in something much more mind numbing.

9-11 had nothing to do with wall-street, or Zionism, the Masons, Opus Dei etc.
It had everything to do with a mode of thinking found in some extremist Islamics which is so removed from your petty bourgeois mind-set you cannot comprehend it.

Sky98
“History has shown that war is a pointless exercise. How can killing innocent people ever be a solution?”

War & killing innocents have served some now “respectable” cultures very well, thank you!

If you win the war, eliminate the opposition & rewrite history who’s to know otherwise.
You then become a respectable culture/creed & you talk about tolerance.

Please read a little more deeply the history of the middle east.

Brushbred,
As I recall Mandela for all statesman’s like qualities, refused to renounce violence and Gorbechov, Nero like, fiddled away while the Soviet Union burnt ( no great qualities needed loose an empire) and Gandhi could only exist under a feeble British Administration –how long would a Gandhi figure last in Taliban Afghanistan or Iran ( read a little about the fate of the founders of Baha’ism when they tried a similar approach)

Dear Chris
you do make some pertinant points which I will not dispute.

But I see them as a kind of 'overlay' like applies to my property, where there is the 'on the ground' day2day realities I face, then I goto council because I want to change something and find this 'overlay' about green wedges and important vegetation blah blah.. its all real, but not always visible. There are bigger hands pulling the econo/geographic strings.

All that I said, I stand by, its not a 'rut', all that you said, I basically concurr with, its not one or the other mate, its both. Do your homework :)

Poor Marilyn. Again, when she points to the very real historic cruelties of various streams of history, misses the point a----gain, that ALL have, are, and will continue to sin, and fall short of the righteousness of God. This includes the USA,Britain and Australia.

She makes true observations, but mistakenly seems to think that I or others have some kind of unilateral moral justification for 'our' history stream, but only condemnation for 'the other' one.

Apart from the (real)Kingdom of God, where there is no racial or cultural divide between people, the world is divided into 'allies and enemies' and the closer you get to the 'top'...the closer you get to the amorality of much going on.

She points to her 'list' of 'victims' and I point to others (Damur) but she then says "but that pales into insignificance compared OUR brutality" (words to that effect) as if there are 'levels' of sin.

I worry about Marilyn, she is good at pointing the moral bone at all and sundry, but solutions ? "stop" ? errr.. tap tap M.... wakey wakey mate.

Life is much more complex than 'good guys' and 'bad guys'...sometimes it deteriorates so far that its just 'us' and 'them'. When the victor rises from the dust and ashes, they rebuild, and contemplate the deeper things of life and love. From the wreckage of the Anglo Saxon invasion and Nors pillaging of England, a Shakespeare arose.

“little is done to discourage the supply...."

What discouraged the supply of Nazis in the 1940s? War dried up the supply; the same thing that discouraged the Japanese militarists and Italian Fascists.

Defeating them in total war dries up the supply. The requirement was for their unconditional surrender as no deal could be struck that would have left these forces with any degree of power. Once defeated, bourgeois democracy was then imposed on these countries in the west and Soviet democracy in the east European countries like Hungary, Bulgaria etc (becoming police-state tyrannies when the revolutionary Soviet Union gave way to the counter-revolutionary revisionist regime of Khrushchev etc).

In the Soviet superpower, proletarian revolutionaries were replaced by state capitalists running a vicious police-state empire that eventually launched a war of conquest into Afghanistan. But what were the other ruling class imperialists in the second superpower up to?

The policies adopted at the end stage of, and immediately after WW2 by the U.S. imperialists of backing other fascists and other right-wingers right across the globe. Having viciously exterminated the hundreds-of-thousands of people at Hiroshima, Dresden, and Nagasaki in order to attempt to intimidate the Soviets under Stalin, they immediately slaughtered the people of Greece and then backed the gangster Chaing Kai Shek as he re-launched a civil-war to prevent democracy in China. Then they interfered in the affairs of the Korean people’s and brought on a war costing millions of lives and ending in stalemate. Then the US inflicted millions of deaths trying to prevent the will of the peoples’ of Indo China while maintaining a political swamp in the Middle East. Ah the history of the Liberals who criticize totalitarian revolutionary communists!

Those who support the bourgeois democratic revolution fight case by case. Liberate the peoples of Iraq and the rest of the swamp will largely drain itself. We can’t endlessly kill terrorists; we have to drain the swamp that breeds them. See the forum at http://www.lastsuperpower.net/ for a full discussion. The US reversing its old rotten policies is the vital first step. The pseudo left do not get it.