The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: November 5, 2006

258 comments on DrumBeat: November 5, 2006

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Leanan on November 5, 2006 - 12:26pm

Actually, if I had a time machine, I'd go back and prevent Israel from ever being created.

Three of the hottest hot spots in the world today are due to England's hasty dismantling of their empire: Israel-Palestine, Pakistan-India-Kashmir...and Iraq.

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sendoilplease on November 5, 2006 - 12:42pm

But leanan, you would have to use your time machine to also go back and heal the rifts between shiites and sunni and islam and christianity and kurds and turks and arabs and persians and ... and...

Israel is just the starting point for the Radical Islamic Army.

What we would like and what is are two different things.

eWe have to deal with what is. Israel exists and is the First Target for the Radical Islamic Army of Iranistan.

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Leanan on November 5, 2006 - 12:51pm

But leanan, you would have to use your time machine to also go back and heal the rifts between shiites and sunni and islam and christianity and kurds and turks and arabs and persians and ... and...

Nah. Let 'em fight. They don't have nukes.

Israel is just the starting point for the Radical Islamic Army.

They wouldn't give a rat's rear about us if we weren't meddling in their countries. And the reason we're meddling is oil.

We have to deal with what is.

Which was actually my point. I don't see anything we can really do about the mess we've made now. But Israel is not sustainable. That is painfully obvious.

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sendoilplease on November 5, 2006 - 1:17pm

"Israel is not sustainable."

Okay, so Israel will be Voted Off The Island first...

I think "We" meddled in their region because "they" have The Oil and that is the only reason "we" pretend to give a rat's hinder for "them."

The Tribes are forming... "The Needy" team is thinking of who they will expell first... meanwhile...

(I think "painfully obvious" will become a common phrase for all of us soon enough.)

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Hurin on November 5, 2006 - 12:57pm

If I had a time machine I would go back and kill the false profet Muhammed.
Besides being a false profet, he was also a bandit, a murderer, and a pederast.

Small wonder Hitler admired his self-made religion.

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sendoilplease on November 5, 2006 - 1:27pm

Change a symptom but the cause remains the same.

Maybe send terminator back to take out Drake...

If you really wanted to put a stop to this you would have to take your time machine back 100K+ years and knock off "eve" and maybe "adam" too...

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Virtual Ipecac on November 5, 2006 - 4:18pm

I would take out the snake and leave the Garden of Eden alone.

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OuttaControl on November 5, 2006 - 7:03pm

I'd just take out God.

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thegoodshipkship on November 5, 2006 - 9:40pm

I'd just replace God with myself. Any honest observer would admit that I'd do a better job. Either that, or with bender from Futurama.

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hummingbird on November 5, 2006 - 1:15pm

I agree. It was a bad idea, probably implemented because Europe and the US didn't want to take in the holocaust refugees. It was like the Europeans planting colonies in North America, only they neglected to kill off 90% of the native inhabitants as they did here.

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toilforoil on November 5, 2006 - 5:14pm

Unfamiliar disease killed off the great majority of the indigenous population in the Americas. The Russians and others who have invaded Palestine live among semites, with overlapping ancestry.

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Samsara on November 5, 2006 - 10:57pm

"Unfamiliar disease killed off the great majority of the indigenous population in the Americas."

Sending in Smallpox on clothing to the villages kinda helped things along too.

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ImSceptical on November 5, 2006 - 10:39pm

They're doing it more slowly.

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Essex Land Rover Man on November 5, 2006 - 3:18pm

England always had a divide and rule policy for governing. Find a minority populace/tribe and give it overwhelming power over its much bigger rival (Sri Lanka, Ireland etc) or better still, promise the same land to two different people (Jews and Palestinians). It made running the Empire much easier, with the dominate tribe hating the minor one rather than the English. Of course once we pulled out, trouble exploded, but that wasn't our problem anymore...

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airdale on November 5, 2006 - 5:42pm

Leanan says:
"I'd go back and prevent Israel from ever being created."

Using the same arguements and looking at what how our country has been a major player in what we now face, it seems that the time machine might have been better used to prevent the USA from ever being created.

Is a bit of bias showing in your remarks? They predate the US by many hundreds of years and actually owned the land they now have a small piece of. They simply ask to live in peace and yet you would prevent them from assuming that land?

I think you are way off base here. Way way off.

Again,,they simply ask to be left alone. They did not start any of the agressive wars against them. They merely attempted to survive.

This is bullshit.

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Leanan on November 5, 2006 - 5:45pm

Using the same arguements and looking at what how our country has been a major player in what we now face, it seems that the time machine might have been better used to prevent the USA from ever being created.

I'm sure a lot of people think that. And maybe they are right.

But I have a feeling it wouldn't make much of a difference. If the U.S. didn't arise here, another, very similar country would have.

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ImSceptical on November 5, 2006 - 10:43pm

Let' see. Somebody writes some fiction which states that some god gave some land [supposedly Israel] to some group [supposedly the Jews, whatever that means], and now the world is supposed to kowtow to the current group calling themselves Jews claiming Israel. Please!

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markincalgary on November 6, 2006 - 2:42pm

First, Leanan was addressing a completely different problem with his time-travel quip.

"They predate the US by many hundreds of years and actually owned the land they now have a small piece of. They simply ask to live in peace and yet you would prevent them from assuming that land?"

Wow! You have little, or a very biased, understanding of the history of the region including and surrounding Israel (also called "occupied Palestine" by some). I can't think of a single conflict where it can't be argued that Israel had a hand in the conflict. Sometimes the hand was small, most of the time it was astonishingly huge. The Wikipedia page on the History of Israel bounces back and forth a bit in its bias, but isn't a bad place to start cultivating an understanding.

I agree that the vast majority of Israeli citizens just want to live in peace. However, their government is definitely not acting in a way that will bring that peace. And the Israeli citizenry seems to grudgingly accept that their government's actions are justified. The American occupation of Iraq has some of the same themes.

Frankly, I agree with Leanan that Israel is between a rock and hard place and will probably get squeezed out of existence eventually. Things will get much worse in the region before they get better. I would much rather see an end to the hostilities and everybody in the region live in a symbiotic way, but I'm far from hopeful.

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