So let's get moving. He had his chance to comply, and is instead trying to dictate to the UN what terms he finds "acceptable". It is apparent that he will continue to play the UN like fools and simpletons, and even more clear that the UN will allow him to do just that. The US said it was willing to allow unconditional inspections, but both the UN and Iraq have now shown what they interpret "unconditional" to mean. Send Scott Ritter over on a peace mission, and launch the full scale attack as soon as we are sure he is in the same room with his new best buddy, Saddam.
5:00:58 PM
And the worm squirms
So now Schroeder feels the need to apologize for the comments made by his defense minister, while simultaneously insisting that she never made them. This sounds like spinmeistering of a most frantic sort, and Schroeder is trying control the damage before the week-end elections.
Here is a nice little historical perspective on why most Arabs left Israel in 1948. Not because the Jews forced them to, but because some Arab leaders promised them that it would only take a matter of weeks to destroy Israel, and the Arabs could then return at their leisure.
I sure wish 1 major news outlet, just one, would actually refer the the West Bank and Gaza as the "disputed territories" rather than the "occupied territories". It seems to me occupied suggests that the country doing the occupying was the aggressor. In this case, Israel was defending itself, and captured these lands by routing the Arab armies. If the Arabs would have left Israel alone, Gaza and the West Bank would be neither occupied nor disputed, but Arab.
4:48:39 PM
Just got back
From a gun show here in Baton Rouge. These things are pretty standard, but I like to go and just look around. But I did see an interesting thing happen at the one today. I had been looking for a Mossberg model 500 shotgun, and stopped by 1 vendor to see what they had. While there, I ran across a fairly irate guy who was incensed because he couldn't buy the rifle he wanted. He had filled out the form, and the vendor had received a "delay" code. Now, delay is different than "deny", but it means that there is some reason that the database is unable to give you a "proceed" ranking, meaning that you can't purchase the firearm you were interested in. The vendor explained to the guy that the most likely reason was that the database was unable to process the request in a timely fashion, which apparently happens if it receives a lot of requests in a short period of time. Now, I have no idea if this is true or not. But it was nice to see evidence that there is no "gun show loophole" in real life.
