Se Cristo potesse risorgere a Bagdad

[Linux&Xunil]

Originariamente inviato da Ma Sara
Un consiglio: attento perché potrebbe mangiare qualche bambino.

[Andreucciolo]

Originariamente inviato da Ser21
quoto,cmq la cosa che più mi fa sorridere è vedere come oramai l'anti "americanismo" sia una moda diffusa,un po' come decidere se comprare un vestito di cavalli o di versace....

Tutti sono contro gli USA poi quando ne abbiamo veramente bisogno siamo tutti pronti a lodare la buonanimità degli stati uniti...

Forse a qualcuno andrebbe ricordato quanto l'Amercia abbia fatto in questi anni per tutti noi dal punto di vista econimica,politico e della sicurezza mondiale...

In questo articolo fatico a trovare tracce di "antiamericanismo"......
anzi proporrei una cosa : perchè non si da una volta per tutte una bella definizione di antiamericanismo? Cosi' finalmente eviteremo gli equivoci linguistici tra di noi almeno.
Comunque quello che gli USA hanno fatto per la nostra ( e la loro) "sicurezza" è sotto gli occhi di tutti.

[-kurgan-]

Originariamente inviato da Ser21
io almeno ho esposto le mie idee,tu invece hai cassato le mie argomentazioni senza ribattere,esattamente come fanno tutti i comunisti che smontano le idee degli altri senza proporre alcuna soluzione alternativa.

Un po' come x la guerra in Iraq,tutti i comunisti dicevano:nn usate la guerra ma la pace...

Ma che cosa c@azz° vuol dire: usate la pace??!?!??
Ma viviamo in un mondo perfetto in cui basta il dialogo x risolvere le cose oppure a volte è necessaria la forza???

Bah,certe volte mi sembra proprio che alcune persone vivano sulla luna x poter fare certe affermazioni...

il papa è comunista? non lo sapevo..

cmq scherzi a parte (ma neanche tanto) evidentemente se c'è gente contraria a questa guerra forse non si doveva neanche iniziarla.. sulle motivazioni ci sono diversi dubbi, tu non ne hai: meglio per te. Ma altri ne hanno.

[SaMu]

Non sono daccordo con Scalfari, ma non so se a qualcuno interessa che argomenti il perchè.

La sensazione è che se scrivo perchè non sono daccordo, molti leggeranno il mio post (o forse dopo 3 righe avranno già letto abbastanza per i loro gusti) dando per scontato che la pensi diversamente da Scalfari e da loro, o meglio dando per scontato che la pensi sbagliata.

Ieri sera quando ho letto l'articolo mi sono sembrate tante e tali le contraddizioni, dentro l'articolo, e con quanto ha scritto Scalfari fino a oggi, e con le sue posizioni che sostiene anche oggi, che il primo impulsivo commento che mi è venuto non era argomentato ma si incentrava sull'arteriosclerosi e sul recente ottantesimo compleanno di Scalfari.

Fortunatamente mi sono trattenuto dal postare. Stamattina sono andato a rileggere i commenti al libro di Oriana Fallaci, e ho ritrovato la stessa mancanza di rispetto, la stessa mancanza di argomentazioni, in generale la stessa banalità, che fortunatamente ieri sera ho evitato.

Ve li ripropongo senza nome degli autori, sperando che finisca questa piaga del forum di commentare in questo modo, che sia la Fallaci o Scalfari, che sia Gino Strada o Curzio Maltese, Ostellino o Furio Colombo o Giuliano Ferrara, chiunque.

Tremate,ritorna la signore terribile della letteratura italiana,da quello che ho letto oggi sul corriere è andata completamente fuori di testa

Ah l'arteriosclerosi.

Io invece ho contatti quotidiani per lavoro con decine di essi e imho la Fallaci, considerando che generalizza in modo così ingenuo e carico di bile, spara una caterva di stronzate.

Non vale neanche la pena di cagarla di striscio

la Fallaci ormai ha capito come funziona il merchandising,se fai rumore vieni notata,a leggere quello che scrive uno la immagina con gli occhi spiritati e la bava alla bocca,spero per lei sia solo un abile mossa commerciale,in caso contrario ha tutta la mia pietà

io mi chiedo se magari fosse la menopausa che la porta ad essere così esageratamente integralista occidentale in questi ultimi anni

Originariamente inviato da Azan
cerca solo di ottenere del successo gridando luoghi comuni.
squallida.

Originariamente inviato da elche20
ma davvero stiamo qui a parlare di una demente fascista??????????

[tati29268]

consiglio di leggere "la crisi dell'islam" di lewis in cui molte delle affermazioni dell'IO scalfari sono sburgiardate del tutto.
per il resto,il vecchio "fascista" scrive bene,anche se sempre parlando di sè...
però,troppo lungo sempre..

[GioFX]

Originariamente inviato da Ser21
io almeno ho esposto le mie idee,tu invece hai cassato le mie argomentazioni senza ribattere,esattamente come fanno tutti i comunisti che smontano le idee degli altri senza proporre alcuna soluzione alternativa.

Un po' come x la guerra in Iraq,tutti i comunisti dicevano:nn usate la guerra ma la pace...

Ma che cosa c@azz° vuol dire: usate la pace??!?!??
Ma viviamo in un mondo perfetto in cui basta il dialogo x risolvere le cose oppure a volte è necessaria la forza???

Bah,certe volte mi sembra proprio che alcune persone vivano sulla luna x poter fare certe affermazioni...

Ma ritorna da dove sei uscito, e va ad offendere un altro... come cacchio di permetti di dirmi chi sono?

se dici che IO non ho argomentazioni, si vede che non hai mai letto una mia discussione, come è facile immaginare...

[-kurgan-]

Originariamente inviato da SaMu
Non sono daccordo con Scalfari, ma non so se a qualcuno interessa che argomenti il perchè.
La sensazione è che se scrivo perchè non sono daccordo, molti leggeranno il mio post (o forse dopo 3 righe avranno già letto abbastanza per i loro gusti) dando per scontato che la pensi diversamente da Scalfari e da loro, o meglio dando per scontato che la pensi sbagliata.
Ieri sera quando ho letto l'articolo mi sono sembrate tante e tali le contraddizioni, dentro l'articolo, e con quanto ha scritto Scalfari fino a oggi, e con le sue posizioni che sostiene anche oggi, che il primo impulsivo commento che mi è venuto non era argomentato ma si incentrava sull'arteriosclerosi e sul recente ottantesimo compleanno di Scalfari.

l'iraq e' un bel guaio, non e' un problema di facile soluzione. La mia idea e' che l'approccio al problema e' completamente sbagliato, per me mantenere uno stato solo con posizioni religiose e politiche cosi' differenti al suo interno sara' cosa davvero difficile.
altro punto su cui discutere e' se l'intervento in iraq ha aumentato o diminuito il pericolo terrorismo.

Originariamente inviato da SaMu
Fortunatamente mi sono trattenuto dal postare. Stamattina sono andato a rileggere i commenti al libro di Oriana Fallaci, e ho ritrovato la stessa mancanza di rispetto, la stessa mancanza di argomentazioni, in generale la stessa banalità, che fortunatamente ieri sera ho evitato.

su oriana fallaci altro discorso, come ho scritto altrove mi sembra netto il cambiamento nel suo porsi verso la guerra rispetto a quanto aveva scritto in passato (in "niente e cosi' sia" ad esempio). Mi pare che abbia molto odio in se' e che generalizzi molto, come ho scritto in un altro topic mi pare piu' una guerra economica che di religione.

[GioFX]

NY Times

April 10, 2004

Afghan Route to Prosperity: Grow Poppies

By AMY WALDMAN

SHORABAK, Afghanistan — Rahmatullah trudged toward his village with his donkey, as men across Afghanistan have done for centuries. But in this century, men in Jeeps and on motorbikes were passing him by.

So this year Rahmatullah, a 37-year-old father of three, speaking in front of the village mosque and its mullah, said he would join his neighbors in growing poppies to harvest Afghanistan's most lucrative cash crop, opium.

His hierarchy of dreams is all sketched out. First he will pay off some $1,200 in debt. Then he will build a house to replace the one room he shares with his family, then buy cows for plowing.

"Then, if I get richer, I'll buy a car," he finished, eyes agleam.

Across Afghanistan, opium cultivation is surging, defying all efforts of the Afghan government and international officials to stop it. Officials are predicting that land under poppy cultivation will rise by 30 percent or more this year, possibly yielding a record crop. Last year the country produced almost 4,000 tons — three-fourths of the world's opium — in 28 of its 32 provinces. The trade generated $1 billion for farmers and $1.3 billion for traffickers, according to the United Nations, more than half of Afghanistan's national income.

The expansion of the trade presents a gathering threat to the new democratic government and a severe challenge to the American and international forces here. But American officials, reluctant to open a new front in the campaign against terror or engage in an antidrug war here, are conflicted about how aggressively to combat it.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said in a recent interview that with Afghanistan's elections approaching — they are now scheduled for September — "the politics of it may require not to go too harsh" with eradication.

But as opium production underpins ever more of Afghanistan's economic life, from new business growth to home construction, officials also fear that the economic and political risks of uprooting it will only increase. To the chagrin of Afghan and international officials, the narcotics industry has far outpaced the legal reconstruction of Afghanistan, with a capitalist intensity they would otherwise applaud.

It has lured private capital for investment and created a free-market system. With Thuraya satellite phones, farmers in distant Kandahar, a rival source of poppy in the south, know almost in real time about changing weather conditions here in this northeastern province, Badakshan, and adjust prices accordingly.

Landowners and traffickers offer credit to farmers willing to grow poppy. Trafficking has linked Afghanistan to the global economy. It even brought the first real industry here, a heroin processing laboratory that villagers estimated had operated for six months to a year before it was destroyed by Afghan and British forces in January. One local referred to it as "the company."

Afghanistan's opium production peaked under the Taliban, who partly financed their movement from the profits. But in July 2000 the Taliban banned opium cultivation, to the distress of many farmers, and the price soared.

Many experts say the ban was simply meant to drive the price up, amounting to an effective cornering of the market for the Taliban and others who had amassed stockpiles.

British and Afghan officials are now counting on mullahs to spread the word that it is haram, or forbidden, under Islam to cultivate opiates. But interviews in many villages found that such preachings were ignored. Other mullahs were growing it themselves.

For many Afghans, poppy has allowed for piety. A United Nations report on Afghanistan's opium economy noted that 85 percent of opium traders surveyed had performed the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is incumbent on every Muslim but too costly for most Afghans.

The growth in opium production is among the gravest threats facing the administration of President Hamid Karzai. It has corrupted the government from bottom to top, including governors and cabinet officials, according to senior Afghan and American officials.

American and Afghan officials say opium is financing warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, local militias, the Taliban and possibly Al Qaeda.

Even as some American officials remain wary of fighting the spread of opium too aggressively, others have criticized the British, who have taken the lead against the drug trade here, for being too soft and slow on eradicating poppy crops. A British plan in 2002 to compensate farmers for eradication is widely seen to have acted as a "perverse incentive" to grow, as one official put it.

Citing the link between narcotics and terrorism, United Nations and British officials, meanwhile, are urging the American-led military alliance to take on laboratories and traffickers. The Americans, who will put $73 million toward antidrug operations in Afghanistan this year, say such an approach will simply send the laboratories over the border to places like Pakistan's tribal areas, while doing nothing to stop the surge in new cultivation.

But an American official also pointed out that many of those in the drug trade "are the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001" from the Taliban and on whom the American military continues to rely in its hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

"The military just does not want to go down that road," he said.

Ideally, officials say, eradication efforts would focus on wealthy landowners growing poppy, not poor farmers. But many struggling farmers have become sharecroppers on the vast fields of the rich and would share the punishment, just as they share the profit.

The American forces have so far limited their intervention against traffickers and laboratories to encounters as they come across them in the course of other military action.

But Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of the American-led forces, said in March that his troops were finding growing connections between extremism and drugs, which could augur a more assertive approach to the drug trade.

Afghan commando units, with British support, have recently raided as many as 30 laboratories in Nangarhar Province, often meeting well-armed resistance. An American A-10 attack plane shelled "the company" — the processing laboratory near here — when the British and Afghan commandos raided that site.

As the effort to treat the laboratories as targets increases, officials expect violence to rise. American officials say raids on laboratories have already provoked conflict among drug traffickers convinced that their competitors informed on them.

Recent fighting in the Argo district prompted the removal of the governor and police chief after officials in Kabul, the capital, concluded that the two men were working for rival traffickers.

The opium trade is transforming life in Argo, a remote district in Badakshan where a cover of green poppies climbs up steep, desolate hills. The street that runs through the bazaar is mud, but the $200 television sets in the stalls glitter.

In the last four years, said Abdul Rahman, 18, poppy provided his family with a motorbike, a television, an electric generator, a VCR and a CD player — and a new house to hold it all. Last year his family accumulated $4,000 in poppy profits.

Badakshan, here in the north, lays bare narcotics' distorting economic effects. Poppy cultivation has driven up dowry prices and raised the cost of labor so much that wheat was not harvested last year.

So many people are building new homes and businesses with their poppy profits that Atiqullah, 23, a mason, said his daily rate had doubled.

Criminal calculation is partly driving the spread of the drug trade. Residents of Pashtun-inhabited regions long known for poppy growing have turned into outlaw Johnny Appleseeds, crossing the country with loans, expertise and seedpods to generate more opium for heroin laboratories, American and United Nations officials and Afghan farmers say.

But a calculus of human longing is also at work. With the price of opium stubbornly stuck at more than $135 a pound, no legal crop can compete.

"We see in Daryan" — a district thick with poppy — "other people getting rich," said Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses one name. "Their life is better. We want to make our life better too."

Today, growing poppies is less about survival — as it was during a drought in this country — than about upward mobility. It is about a new consumer class and an even larger class of aspirants to it.

"Those who had a donkey have a motorbike," said Ahmed Shah, a young farmer in Badakshan. "Those who had a motorbike have a car. Those who have one wife want a second one."

In Dari, the local language, there is a saying: if your donkey lags behind, cut his ear off. It reflects, Afghans say, the central role of envy in their culture — and in cultivation.

The Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, is full of first-time growers, many of them mujahedeen soldiers. A young commander, Mayel, denied that he was growing poppy, then whispered in earshot of a translator that he was too ashamed to admit that he was.

"We see the people in the south and east getting rich," he told a confidant with righteous logic. "Why shouldn't we cultivate too?"

[GioFX]

Over 600 iraqi civilians killed in last weeks fighting

FALLUJAH, Iraq — A fragile cease-fire held between Sunni insurgents and U.S. Marines on Sunday in the besieged city of Fallujah (search), where Iraqis said more than 600 civilians were killed in the past week. Near Baghdad, gunmen shot down a U.S. attack helicopter, killing two crewmembers.

Also, the military suggested it is open to a negotiated solution in its showdown with a radical Shiite cleric in the south.

Most of the Iraqis killed in Fallujah in fighting that started last Monday were women, children and elderly, the director of the city hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, told The Associated Press. A U.S. Marine commander disputed that, saying most of the dead were probably insurgents.

Fallujah residents took advantage of the lull in fighting to bury their dead in two soccer fields. One of the fields had rows of freshly dug graves, some marked on headstones as children or with the names of women.

The Fallujah violence spilled over to the nearby western entrance of Baghdad, where gunmen shot down an American AH-64 Apache helicopter (search). As a team moved in to secure the bodies of the two dead crewmen, a large force of tanks and troops pushed down the highway outside the Iraqi capital, aiming to crush insurgents.

Gunmen have run rampant in the Abu Ghraib (search) district west of Baghdad for three days, attacking fuel convoys, killing a U.S. soldier and two American civilians and kidnapping another American.

The captors of Thomas Hamill (search), an American who works for a U.S. contractor in Iraq, threatened to kill and burn him unless U.S. troops end their assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad, by 6 a.m. Sunday. The deadline passed with no word on Hamill's fate.

China's official Xinhua News Agency reported that gunmen had kidnapped seven Chinese in central Iraq. The report cited a Chinese diplomat in Baghdad, but gave no details. The Arab TV station Al-Arabiya reported insurgents seized the Chinese north of Fallujah on Sunday evening, also citing Chinese diplomatic sources.

Insurgents who kidnapped other foreigners this week began releasing some captives. A Briton was freed, and other kidnappers said they were freeing eight captives of various nationalities. Other insurgents who kidnapped two Japanese men and a woman said Saturday they would free their captives within 24 hours, but they had not been freed by Sunday night.

The U.S. military on Sunday reported 12 more U.S. soldiers killed in fighting on Friday and Saturday — half of them in Baghdad. The deaths brought to 59 the number of American soldier killed since the new fronts of violence erupted April 4. Nearly 900 Iraqis have been killed in the same period. At least 663 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Sporadic battles in Fallujah wounded two Marines, and the bodies of 11 Iraqis were brought to a mosque being used as a clinic. A Marine spokesman said troops responding to Iraqi fire killed "a significant number" of fighters. A Cobra helicopter fired rockets and missiles after it came under ground fire, he said.

But Fallujah was still the quietest it has been since the U.S. offensive began.

Hundreds of Marine reinforcements moved in around Fallujah, joining 1,200 Marines and 900 Iraqis already there. The military has warned it may resume an all-out assault against Sunni insurgents if negotiations focused on extending the cease-fire and restoring police control of the city fall through.

President Bush, attending an Easter Sunday service at a chapel at the U.S. Army base Fort Hood (search), Texas, braced Americans for the possibility of more casualties in Iraq while saying the U.S.-led mission is just.

"It was a tough week last week and my prayers and thoughts are with those who pay the ultimate price for our security," the president said.

But he said the United States was "open to suggestions" about resolving the siege, referring to negotiations between Iraqi politicians and Fallujah city officials that continued Sunday.

Governing Council members were holding discussions with followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia rose up in a bloody revolt this week against coalition troops and largely controls three southern cities, Karbala, Kufa and Najaf.

The south was relatively calm, as up to 1.5 million Shiite pilgrims marked al-Arbaeen, one of the holiest days of their religious calendar, in Karbala on Sunday, with al-Sadr militiamen and other gunmen keeping security in the streets.

U.S. commanders have said they would delay any action against al-Sadr until after the ceremonies, which ended Sunday. But U.S. officials for the first time suggested there were open to a nonmilitary solution to the confrontation.

U.S. coalition spokesman Dan Senor would not comment on Iraqi talks with al-Sadr's followers but added, "I would say that our goal is to minimize bloodshed and to head off any sort of conflict."

"We don't see it as a necessary requirement that any military action has to occur in Najaf," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters.

U.S. troops retook the city of Kut from al-Sadr followers in the past three days, in the first major foray in months by the American military into southern Iraq, where U.S. allies have security duties.

But military action to retake the other cities could require fighting near some of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, raising the possibility of enflaming Shiite anger at the U.S.-led occupation.

"There are many ways for the town of Najaf to come back under legitimate control of the Iraqi government, coalition provisions authority and that don't involve any fighting at all," Kimmitt said.

U.S.-allied Iraqi leaders have increasingly expressed anger at the bloodshed in Iraq over the past week, saying the military has used excessive force.

Over a third of the city's 200,000 residents fled the city during the lull, Marines said. Fallujah hospital's al-Issawi said the number of Iraqi dead in the city was likely higher than the 600 recorded at the hospital and four main clinics in the city.

"We have reports of an unknown number of dead being buried in people's homes without coming to the clinics," he said.

Bodies were being buried at two soccer fields. At one of the fields, dubbed the "Graveyard of the Martyrs" by residents, an AP reporter saw rows of freshly dug graves with wooden planks for headstones over an area about 30 yards wide by more than 100 yards long.

Khalaf al-Jumaili, a volunteer helping bury bodies at the field, said more than 300 people had been interred there. Volunteers were seen carrying bodies in blankets and lowering them into graves while bystanders shouted, "Martyr, martyr!"

It was not known how many were buried at the other soccer field.

Asked about the report of 600 dead, Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said, "What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting."

"The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower .... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do," he said.

At least five Marines have died in the Fallujah fighting.

The most serious break in Sunday's peace came when a sniper opened fire on U.S. patrol, wounding two Marines, commanders said. In the ensuing gunbattle, at least one insurgent was killed.

"At the moment we're just trying to get the cease-fire in place," L. Paul Bremer (search), the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "What were trying to do is simply get the forces to stop firing."

During the lull, Marines distributed food to residents. At least three convoys of food and medicine were brought into the mostly Sunni city, including one organized by Shiite leaders in Baghdad as a sign of unity.

Da: Fox News

[Alessandro Bordin]

Originariamente inviato da Linux&Xunil
Se Cristo potesse risorgere a Bagdad...

Durerebbe poco: ha i capelli lunghi, la barba e sarebbe un palestinese che parla troppo

Battute a parte, difficile anche per molti americani capire l'intervento in Iraq, anche se con un po' di ritardo. Carter e molti altri stanno chedendo spiegazioni circonstanziate, vedremo cosa ne esce. Non un bel periodo per Bush.