[cite]Posted By: stonemuse[/cite]I have a couple of friends in Cairo (locals) and they are relatively confident that we will see your first option 'secular democracy' ... but they are not so confident it will happen quickly. In the meantime, they are not too concerned with the military staying in place ... better that than no-one.
Oh I am sure as things are currently, they will be happy with the military being in temporary control.
History is littered with Military regimes which come to power to hold a strong line against anarchy or the forces of darkness. The challenge for the Military is to stand back and allow free elections to take place and then to accept the outcome, even if the result is not what they desire.
Latest info from an hour or so ago:
Egypt's military rulers have appointed a retired judge to head a committee tasked with amending the constitution to allow for democratic elections later this year.
Former Egyptian judge Tareq el-Bishri will lead the eight-member panel, which also includes sitting judges, legal experts, and former lawmaker Sobhi Saleh of the banned Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. The panel held its first meeting Tuesday with the leader of Egypt's military council, Hussein Tantawi.
Pro-democracy activists who met with the council Sunday say it promised them the constitutional amendments will be drafted in 10 days and put to the public in a national referendum within two months.
[cite]Posted By: stonemuse[/cite]My opinion is that neither are right, they're both very, very wrong and it's a truly depressing situation.
Absolutely IA ... but now the situation is in place it makes it harder to turn it around ... not impossible, but more difficult. We need determination on both sides and someone very strong to bring the 'strands' together ... at least someone better than the current 'Middle East Ambassador'.
Yes, I'll always have hope, but then it's easy for me as I don't live under the constant threat of Israeli or Hamas rockets.
[cite]Posted By: Henry Irving[/cite]Also you have to factor in that Eygpt and Iran follow, unless I am mistaken, different streams of Islam. Sunni and Shia may seem to outsider to have few differences but just as catholics and protestants within Christianity do not always see eye to eye the two have different political outlooks making the import of the Iranian idea of Islam to Egypt and elsewhere less likely.
That's true but Iran supports Hamas, a Sunni group which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood centred Eygpt.
Iranian foreign policy is dominated by the regime's opposition to Israel and the US rather than fear of the Sunnis.
You have to understand why Iran hates the west and the US in particular.
After WWI the west needed a cheap supply of oil and the Middle East was the only reliable source that was close to Europe, there was also the Caucasus but the natives there weren't quite as amenable to the west stealing as the Persians and Arabs were, and the latter were divided and the concepts of states like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait etc were a long way off being recognised. To an extent that was an accident of history, after WWI the Turkish dominated Ottoman Empire collapsed leaving Britain holding parts of the ME like Palestine.
Recognising that Persia was oil rich Anglo-Persia Oil moved in and started drilling and made itself very wealthy very quickly. The Persians received a very small royalty in return. In 1951 the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry, then controlled by Britain and appointed Mohammad Mosaddeq, as prime minister. After two years of threats that became increasingly more serious a CIA backed coup overthrew Mosaddeq and his government and gave full power to the Shah. Although not as brutal as some dictators he nevertheless had a poor human rights record and the US/west turned a blind eye - the oil was still flowing and the rest was a matter of details.
However the voices of opposition grew stronger and in particular they coalseced around the Ayatollah's as religious leaders, and in particular the Ayatollah Khomeini who seems to have been charismatic and had the sense to promote the idea that not only should the Shah go but that he would oversee the return of democracy. That was enough to win over enough moderates who feared a theocracy. The Shah was desposed, Khomeini returned and reneged on his promises to hold democratic elections. More troubling for the US/west he nationalised Iran's oil and created an enemy in the US. The US then responded by backing an Iraqi warlord/thug by the name of Saddam Hussein who had been on the books of the CIA since the 1960s. They supported his coup and encouraged him to go to war with Iran, on the basis that with the revolutionary turmoil and overthrow of the Shah that the Iranian army was at it's weakest - undoubtedly a lot of officers had either fled the country or were in prison, or simply out of work having been sacked because they supported the old regime. For a couple of years Iran held it's own but struggled, however call it revolutionary zeal, strength of numbers or whatever they turned the tables on Iraq and Saddam and began to emerge as likely winners. This gave the US a problem, they had hoped that Saddam would win a quick war, would depose the Ayatollah's and restore US control of the oil fields.
So off to Baghdad went Donald Rumsfeld and for the next few years a flow of western (by no means was it all US) money, munitions and intelligence flowed. An Iranian airliner got shot down, the Iraqi navy got shot up and Reagan as president of the US publically blamed the gassing by Saddam of Iranian troops as an attack by the Iranians themselves. All because Iran wanted access to their own oil...
[cite]Posted By: nth london addick[/cite]Can I ask how you all became so knowledgeable.
Watch Newsnight or Channel4 News, as they have time to go a bit more into the background of what's happening, rather than just report the "as it happens" stuff. Also have a flick through the telly guide for documentaries - BBC4, More4 or Yesterday normally have a pretty good selection of stuff.
Iran currently produces/exports around 4.5% of the world's oil - that's about 4m barrels a day.
Globally around 80 m barrels a day are produced and consumed, keeping prices relatively speaking stable. So any attack on Iran would shut down the ports and make the export of oil from Iran nigh on impossible for some time. Given that a tweak in supply/demand can send oil prices soaring restricting around 3-4m barrels of oil a day would send the price of oil up sharply. No one benefits from that, certainly not the Yanks whose entire economy is based on oil and who have to import around 4m barrels a day - or around 70% of their daily use. It's simply not feasible for them to store enough oil to last even a fortnight and disruption from a war is likely to cause exports from Iran to slow for months. Most Iranian oil exports go to India and China and both have rapidly developing economies (China is now the World's second largest economy) so those two nations would simply look elsewhere and the open market is where they'll find it. If you don't like paying £1.30 a litre for petrol now just wait until iran gets attacked, that price will look cheap.
The Iraq war took place to give the US access to supplies of oil - Iraq has decades worth of oil and more importantly it was close to a port and not that far underground, making it easy to extract. With Iraqi oil infrastructure a generation or two behind the west's there was also a lot of money to be made from building ports, pipelines, storage facilities etc, and that's were Dick Cheney's company Halliburton came in. Fronting a series of oil men and religious nut jobs they got George Bush elected and then looked for an excuse to leverage US power to grab Middle Eastern oil and on Sept 11th 2001 they found it.
[quote][cite]Posted By: nth london addick[/cite]Always drink coca cola henners the advert says so.
When threads like this come up along with the general election threads some of the knowledge never fails to amaze me I must walk round with my eyes closed.
Must remember to put down the sun, and not think about tits and football so much.[/quote]
All this info is on the OS and the matchday programme.
[cite]Posted By: Henry Irving[/cite]Not sure if they hate each other. Some sunni may hate some shia and vice versa, but just as most Catholics don't hate protestants or the other way around, in most places the two get along fine.
yes lots of examples of when they don't and there is friction but not everywhere.
Ok fair enough, perhaps my comment was too dogmatic. What we do know is that there are huge tensions between the groups especially in Iraq. What we also know is that those in control within the Arab League countries fear the Shia dominated Iranians, especially a nuclear enhanced Iran.
and then of course we have " geert wilders, europe's most dangerous man? " on the box tonight, pouring more petrol, onto an already highly flammable issue.
very bloody scary.
this will probably sound bad to a few of you so excuse my ignorance, but who exactly is geert wilders? why is he dangerous?
Geert Wilders is a controversial "right wing" Dutch politician with strong links to Israel and very strong anti Islamic views. Far from being marginalised in Dutch politics Wilders party has real influence in the Dutch coalition due to his success in recent general election. Like a lot of right and left wing extremism much of what is said is plausible and attractive to many. He is supported internationally by right wing groups such as the EDL in this country and similar groups throughout Europe. I find it odd that a traditionally tolerant liberal country like The nederlands has thrown up the first real right wing politician in europe with genuine influence. As said earlier these are dangerous times.
[cite]Posted By: ShootersHillGuru[/cite]I find it odd that a traditionally tolerant liberal country like The nederlands has thrown up the first real right wing politician in europe with genuine influence. As said earlier these are dangerous times.
[cite]Posted By: ShootersHillGuru[/cite]I find it odd that a traditionally tolerant liberal country like The nederlands has thrown up the first real right wing politician in europe with genuine influence. As said earlier these are dangerous times.
Plenty of Dutch Nazis in WW2
Yes very true Bing but I think that the general view of modern day Nederlands is one of a liberal attitude.
shg, from my admitedly very unscientific conversations with a few dutch people it is precisely the fact that it is a liberal, tolerant country that has left them so wrong footed by the spread of wahabi islam within their nation (state sponsered by our esteemed allies in saudi arabia).
On the one hand their natural instinct is to defend minorities but the issue becomes much more blurred when a significant proportion of said minority hold views which can only be described as extreme and contradict the tolerant values that define their nation.
Yeah - the 'religious tolerance' issue is a very, very difficult one. On the one hand, you want to encourage people not only to integrate, but to retain their own culture and their own identity too - otherwise it's not 'integration', it's 'assimilation'.
However, some religions (and some specific sects within religions) have views that are utterly abhorrent. The treatment of women in islam as a whole is an absolute f***ing disgrace, as is the attitude toward homosexuality (though the latter is true of most religions). The 'lunatic fringe' of islam is no nuttier than the lunatic fringe of judaism - yet because zionists are not stealing land and building houses on it here, nobody brackets them together.
As with most things, an already complicated argument is made infinitely more complicated by the 'my imaginary friends is better than yours' bullshit that is seemingly inherent in all interpretations of religion.
Yes, tis me! I am enjoying it - have been to some interesting places including Yemen (D will tell you what happened there!) and now here, which is probably the most interesting of all. The boss here (and his wife) the other 2 Addicts I'm aware of. He was over the moon when he found out and I bought him a SCP t-shirt! Am keeping in touch through this Forum, 606 and Player - when there aren't 'problem's with t'internet here!
My views on multiculturalism and tolerance changed completely after 9/11 and 7/7. I had lived all my life up to that point with a romanticised vision of people respecting each other’s cultures and living together in harmony – think Blue Mink and “Melting Pot”! That was literally blown apart by those events, especially 7/7 because one of the bombs went off just yards from where I worked and I so easily could’ve been caught up in it.
I’m not a religious man – as Leroy put it, it’s all about “my God is better than your God”. However, I now think that Britain should make it quite clear what our core values are and that they are based on Christianity. Bending over backwards to accept other cultures and religions with different values to ours is not the way to go – we’ve tried that and it didn’t work. You want to live and work in this country, you have to accept that.
What I cannot understand is the people who grow up here, get “radicalised”, then go to Pakistan, learn how to be a suicide bomber and finally return here to bomb us. In a lot of cases, these are people that were born here – their parents have lived and worked here and have enjoyed their lives here – what has gone wrong? I was going to say if they don’t like it, why don’t they just go home? But that’s not what they want – they hate us, they hate our culture and they want to destroy it.
Second generation immigrants take things for granted that the first generation worked hard for. This coupled with racism leads to a chip on their shoulder which leads some to extremism.
I agree that multiculturalism is as romantic as it seems but don't base out values on Christianity either. All religions are very similar imo, the books can be interpreted in a numerous ways, there are christian's in America who protest at the funerals of dead soldiers.
The previous posts about the history of Iran were very interesting, cheers!
[cite]Posted By: Friend Or Defoe[/cite]Second generation immigrants take things for granted that the first generation worked hard for. This coupled with racism leads to a chip on their shoulder which leads some to extremism.
Good points FOD, especially regarding 2nd generation ... which can happen in any society with any immigrants ... just look at the Turkish in Frankfurt for example.
Misinterpretation ... or intentional misleading interpretation to serve selfish needs ... has been the problem since time immemorial. Muslims (Sunni & Shia) believe that Christianity has changed the 'message' and that the Koran has the true message. However, having spent a little time reading the Koran, it is clear to me that it can also be interpreted in many ways, depending on how you wish it to be interpreted ... hence the problem between Sunni and Shia for instance.
I know there is a lot more to it than this, but all the time in the world would not be enough to get to the bottom of this conundrum.
Comments
Latest info from an hour or so ago:
Egypt's military rulers have appointed a retired judge to head a committee tasked with amending the constitution to allow for democratic elections later this year.
Former Egyptian judge Tareq el-Bishri will lead the eight-member panel, which also includes sitting judges, legal experts, and former lawmaker Sobhi Saleh of the banned Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. The panel held its first meeting Tuesday with the leader of Egypt's military council, Hussein Tantawi.
Pro-democracy activists who met with the council Sunday say it promised them the constitutional amendments will be drafted in 10 days and put to the public in a national referendum within two months.
Yes, I'll always have hope, but then it's easy for me as I don't live under the constant threat of Israeli or Hamas rockets.
Yeah I was just going to post that myself. It looks pretty promising, if they carry it through.
That's true but Iran supports Hamas, a Sunni group which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood centred Eygpt.
Iranian foreign policy is dominated by the regime's opposition to Israel and the US rather than fear of the Sunnis.
After WWI the west needed a cheap supply of oil and the Middle East was the only reliable source that was close to Europe, there was also the Caucasus but the natives there weren't quite as amenable to the west stealing as the Persians and Arabs were, and the latter were divided and the concepts of states like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait etc were a long way off being recognised. To an extent that was an accident of history, after WWI the Turkish dominated Ottoman Empire collapsed leaving Britain holding parts of the ME like Palestine.
Recognising that Persia was oil rich Anglo-Persia Oil moved in and started drilling and made itself very wealthy very quickly. The Persians received a very small royalty in return. In 1951 the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry, then controlled by Britain and appointed Mohammad Mosaddeq, as prime minister. After two years of threats that became increasingly more serious a CIA backed coup overthrew Mosaddeq and his government and gave full power to the Shah. Although not as brutal as some dictators he nevertheless had a poor human rights record and the US/west turned a blind eye - the oil was still flowing and the rest was a matter of details.
However the voices of opposition grew stronger and in particular they coalseced around the Ayatollah's as religious leaders, and in particular the Ayatollah Khomeini who seems to have been charismatic and had the sense to promote the idea that not only should the Shah go but that he would oversee the return of democracy. That was enough to win over enough moderates who feared a theocracy. The Shah was desposed, Khomeini returned and reneged on his promises to hold democratic elections. More troubling for the US/west he nationalised Iran's oil and created an enemy in the US. The US then responded by backing an Iraqi warlord/thug by the name of Saddam Hussein who had been on the books of the CIA since the 1960s. They supported his coup and encouraged him to go to war with Iran, on the basis that with the revolutionary turmoil and overthrow of the Shah that the Iranian army was at it's weakest - undoubtedly a lot of officers had either fled the country or were in prison, or simply out of work having been sacked because they supported the old regime. For a couple of years Iran held it's own but struggled, however call it revolutionary zeal, strength of numbers or whatever they turned the tables on Iraq and Saddam and began to emerge as likely winners. This gave the US a problem, they had hoped that Saddam would win a quick war, would depose the Ayatollah's and restore US control of the oil fields.
So off to Baghdad went Donald Rumsfeld and for the next few years a flow of western (by no means was it all US) money, munitions and intelligence flowed. An Iranian airliner got shot down, the Iraqi navy got shot up and Reagan as president of the US publically blamed the gassing by Saddam of Iranian troops as an attack by the Iranians themselves. All because Iran wanted access to their own oil...
Globally around 80 m barrels a day are produced and consumed, keeping prices relatively speaking stable. So any attack on Iran would shut down the ports and make the export of oil from Iran nigh on impossible for some time. Given that a tweak in supply/demand can send oil prices soaring restricting around 3-4m barrels of oil a day would send the price of oil up sharply. No one benefits from that, certainly not the Yanks whose entire economy is based on oil and who have to import around 4m barrels a day - or around 70% of their daily use. It's simply not feasible for them to store enough oil to last even a fortnight and disruption from a war is likely to cause exports from Iran to slow for months. Most Iranian oil exports go to India and China and both have rapidly developing economies (China is now the World's second largest economy) so those two nations would simply look elsewhere and the open market is where they'll find it. If you don't like paying £1.30 a litre for petrol now just wait until iran gets attacked, that price will look cheap.
The Iraq war took place to give the US access to supplies of oil - Iraq has decades worth of oil and more importantly it was close to a port and not that far underground, making it easy to extract. With Iraqi oil infrastructure a generation or two behind the west's there was also a lot of money to be made from building ports, pipelines, storage facilities etc, and that's were Dick Cheney's company Halliburton came in. Fronting a series of oil men and religious nut jobs they got George Bush elected and then looked for an excuse to leverage US power to grab Middle Eastern oil and on Sept 11th 2001 they found it.
When threads like this come up along with the general election threads some of the knowledge never fails to amaze me I must walk round with my eyes closed.
Must remember to put down the sun, and not think about tits and football so much.[/quote]
All this info is on the OS and the matchday programme.
Ok fair enough, perhaps my comment was too dogmatic. What we do know is that there are huge tensions between the groups especially in Iraq. What we also know is that those in control within the Arab League countries fear the Shia dominated Iranians, especially a nuclear enhanced Iran.
I think I know you. We went to Millwall away together
How's the posting going?
Ben
this will probably sound bad to a few of you so excuse my ignorance, but who exactly is geert wilders? why is he dangerous?
When whispers go wrong! #185749
Plenty of Dutch Nazis in WW2
Yes very true Bing but I think that the general view of modern day Nederlands is one of a liberal attitude.
On the one hand their natural instinct is to defend minorities but the issue becomes much more blurred when a significant proportion of said minority hold views which can only be described as extreme and contradict the tolerant values that define their nation.
However, some religions (and some specific sects within religions) have views that are utterly abhorrent. The treatment of women in islam as a whole is an absolute f***ing disgrace, as is the attitude toward homosexuality (though the latter is true of most religions). The 'lunatic fringe' of islam is no nuttier than the lunatic fringe of judaism - yet because zionists are not stealing land and building houses on it here, nobody brackets them together.
As with most things, an already complicated argument is made infinitely more complicated by the 'my imaginary friends is better than yours' bullshit that is seemingly inherent in all interpretations of religion.
Yes, tis me! I am enjoying it - have been to some interesting places including Yemen (D will tell you what happened there!) and now here, which is probably the most interesting of all. The boss here (and his wife) the other 2 Addicts I'm aware of. He was over the moon when he found out and I bought him a SCP t-shirt!
Am keeping in touch through this Forum, 606 and Player - when there aren't 'problem's with t'internet here!
COYR!
What happened?
CL - so I've realised.
Don't want to go on about it on here - ask D!
will do
I’m not a religious man – as Leroy put it, it’s all about “my God is better than your God”. However, I now think that Britain should make it quite clear what our core values are and that they are based on Christianity. Bending over backwards to accept other cultures and religions with different values to ours is not the way to go – we’ve tried that and it didn’t work. You want to live and work in this country, you have to accept that.
What I cannot understand is the people who grow up here, get “radicalised”, then go to Pakistan, learn how to be a suicide bomber and finally return here to bomb us. In a lot of cases, these are people that were born here – their parents have lived and worked here and have enjoyed their lives here – what has gone wrong? I was going to say if they don’t like it, why don’t they just go home? But that’s not what they want – they hate us, they hate our culture and they want to destroy it.
Bloody hell – there are no easy answers.
I agree that multiculturalism is as romantic as it seems but don't base out values on Christianity either. All religions are very similar imo, the books can be interpreted in a numerous ways, there are christian's in America who protest at the funerals of dead soldiers.
The previous posts about the history of Iran were very interesting, cheers!
What complete utter bollocks.
Misinterpretation ... or intentional misleading interpretation to serve selfish needs ... has been the problem since time immemorial. Muslims (Sunni & Shia) believe that Christianity has changed the 'message' and that the Koran has the true message. However, having spent a little time reading the Koran, it is clear to me that it can also be interpreted in many ways, depending on how you wish it to be interpreted ... hence the problem between Sunni and Shia for instance.
I know there is a lot more to it than this, but all the time in the world would not be enough to get to the bottom of this conundrum.