Mahmood's Den
An Arab man's attempt at bridging the cultural gap. Trying to make a difference, failing a lot, succeeding once in a while.
09 May, 2006 
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What the hell is Ahmadinejad is on? Writing an 18 page letter to Bush? For crap’s sake the second can’t read and the first is a loonie, what do you suspect the 18 pages contained?
A simple “I’m sorry sir, I’ve been a bad boy” would have sufficed wouldn’t you think?
Maybe he did just write that, but in large script!
Rogork: Dude, shut it. I'm not even sure what's your point...
Steve the America: This explains why lab rats don't rule the world in...
FlyHajj Team: "If it were not difficult, it wouldn't be Hajj".
...
nhusain: Is there any video of the speech?...
Robert: Anyone given, rented or "sold" public land in Bahr...
nhusain: We love you Mahmood. If this guy is a real man he...
Anonny: You can't even admit to being a troll. Sad. Oh, an...
FYI: Naive imbeciles like you, is what’s wrong with B...
ihath: What was your wish? Couldn't see it clearly in you...
You guys should really get a life.. seriously..
How much time do you spend blogging!?? Holy crap!
You can be more productive taking action than ranting and ranting all day long!
and Mahmood.. seriously.. you should really spend time working and taking care of your family.. you’re a family man for chirst’s sake!
ًWhy thank you for your concern Shizzle. You’ll pardon me for not taking it.
Mahmood, shame on you! Time spent blogging is time away from your garden and plants.
I know… sorry!
You’re most welcome Lujayn. I’ve found it a good panacea for hysterics
Will do my best to avoid hysterics, Jared.
Shizzle, you don’t know what you are talking about; human beings are multi-tasking and can hold a job, garden, blog and spend plenty of time with their family. It’s called living. I am very grateful that Mahmood does what he does. I’ve learned a lot from him and others and been forced to re-examine my beliefs about a whole lot of things, and that’s a good thing.
Oh goodness, not implying that you were engaging in hysterics Lujayne – apologies if it came out that way! Here’s another debunking site that I like – not exactly on topic, but one day it may be:
http://www.snopes.com
Jared in NYC: “For the right wing nutters – Saddam did not have Al Qaeda ties.”
Criminetly, Jared, put down that liberal Kool Aid. Saddam certainly did have long-standing informal ties with Al Qaeda. They were reported in both the Western and Middle Eastern press long before Sep 11. Mohammed Atta met with Saddam’s chief of covert ops in Europe in a restaurant in the suburbs of Prague. One of Saddam’s agents arranged and attended an Al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur which included two of the Sep 11 skyjackers.
Stephen Hayes has rounded up all the evidence of Saddam-Al Qaeda ties in his book, “The Connection : How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00073HH92/qid=1147354154/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-7428518-8266556?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Here is an article which sums up the public evidence of collaboration between Saddam and Al Qaeda:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp
Jared, it’s not the right wing nutters who say there was a tie between Saddam and Al Qaeda, it’s the evidence. It is the left wing nutters such as you who insanely deny such evidence exists. There are only two reasons for denying these ties: 1) Ignorance, the lefties who claim this simply don’t do their homework and don’t know any better; or 2) Dishonesty, the lefties know the truth but don’t care, they would rather support a lie that undermines Bush than accept evidence that bolsters his case.
Which category do you fall in, Jared?
Jared in NYC: “There were NO WMD in Iraq.”
You have made this false claim once and I have shown it to be false. This time you are simply lying. It is not the right wing nutters who claim to have found WMD in Iraq, it is the Duelfer Report. It takes about thirty seconds to find this stuff on the Internet. Since you are too lazy to even do that, I will spoonfeed you the relevant facts:
“Since May 2004, ISG has recovered dozens of additional chemical munitions, including artillery rounds, rockets and a binary Sarin artillery projectile.”
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5.html#sect0
In case you are unclear about this, “dozens of additional chemical munitions” is not “NO WMD in Iraq” as you dishonestly claim against documented facts to the contrary.
Duelfer also states:
“Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a CW effort when sanctions were lifted and conditions were judged favorable: Saddam and many Iraqis regarded CW as a proven weapon against an enemy’s superior numerical strength, a weapon that had saved the nation at least once already—during the Iran-Iraq war—and contributed to deterring the Coalition in 1991 from advancing to Baghdad.”
The bottom line is that while Saddam apparently disposed of most of his WMD, he still had dozens of them left and intended to resume production as soon as possible.
In addition, insurgents injured two of our soldiers in Iraq with an IED made from a chemical weapons artillery shell full of sarin nerve agent, a WMD: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120268,00.html
Now tell us, Jared, how could that WMD be detonated in Iraq when you tell us that “There were NO WMD in Iraq.” Was that some kind of imaginary WMD?
Jared in NYC: “For the left wing nutters – Bush did NOT lie about WMD to start a war, most intelligence believed Iraq had some:
OK, Jared, there is some hope for you. That’s right, even Saddam’s generals believed there were WMD stockpiles.
Saddam was committed to WMD. They saved him during the Iran-Iraq war and he believed, in error, that his WMDs deterred the Americans from attacking Baghdad in Desert Storm.
Steve
Jared, I was going to change that to “I do my best to avoid hysterics”, but I had already submitted the comment. I have to admit, I, like most, do sometimes blurt things out without really thinking them through – its so much easier to jump on the bandwagon than to really question things. So no, I am not at all offended by your remark. It’s pointless if I’m only here to argue the beliefs that I hold and I refuse to question them.
Steve,
If I’m a liar, I guess you’re calling Donald Rumsfeld a liar as well. He also says there were no WMD in Iraq:
“They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4975372.stm
You’re sometimes, but not always a wingnut. To your credit, I admit that you are often an entertaining one. Don’t be mean or I wont save you any grappa.
Jared
Jared in NYC: “Maybe we ought to resurrect a new version of your Bin Laden drinking game. Every time you invoke “lefty herd” or label someone with a political description and then attack the label, I’ll have drink of the (very, very fine) grappa I brough back from Milan a few weeks ago. If you’re nice, maybe I’ll even share some with you. Mahmood gets first dibs though.”
My, my, my, but you have been lurking a long time to dig up such references to the Malikian Era. However, if you are intent on guzzling grappa at my every mention of leftist nonsense, take my advice and buy more grappa. A lot more. You’ll need it. It will please me terrifically to know that my words will give you a golden glow of happiness, as well they should.
I’ll have to pass on the grappa myself because more than two glasses of wine gives me a splitting headache in the morning and grappa looks more potent than the Spätlese I sip once per year. I think I’ll stick with Diet Coke, the breakfast of champions. However, feel free to pass my share on to Mahmood. Just don’t get him too drunk to type. I don’t want to see him running naked through the streets shrieking about Batelco.
And Rumsfeld’s wrong as the Duelfer Report clearly shows and he knows. He probably misspoke, thinking that there were not WMDs in militarily significant amounts.
Steve
Steve said:
Steve, your powers of reinterpreting the words of the Secretary of Defence are truly remarkable. How far does this ability extend? Perhaps you can glean similar meaning from this gem by by General Douglas MacArthur, uttered during a speech to cadets at the West Point Military Academy, October 1955:
“The next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets.”
Jared
Mahmood said:
Mahmood my friend, if I know you’re coming to NY, I will absolutely save an entire bottle for you and take time off to show you around!
Jared
Jared thank you very much for your generosity, nothing would make me happier than coming to the Big Apple, walking along broadway and enjoying some of the shows!
One day…
Jared in NYC: “Steve, your powers of reinterpreting the words of the Secretary of Defence are truly remarkable. How far does this ability extend? Perhaps you can glean similar meaning from this gem by by General Douglas MacArthur, uttered during a speech to cadets at the West Point Military Academy, October 1955:
“The next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets.”
MacArthur never said it. According to Snopes, MacArthur made no speech at the Point in 1955. Apparently, it is based on a comment MacArthur made during a private visit from the Mayor of Naples, Italy about the possibility of life on other planets and that sometime in the future Earth might need to unite confront it.
That was distorted by the media into a bogus story about MacArthur warning about an imminent space war. Those bogus stories, in turn, were rehashed by UFO nuts into assertions that MacArthur was warning that aliens were attacking Earth.
So you have gone from using lefty nuts as the authority for your positions to UFO nuts. In other words, you have abandoned chicks gabbing at the next table at uptown Starbucks in Manhattan as your highest source of information and are now using guys wearing tinfoil hats in trailers down by the river.
Jared, you’re slowly floating away from Earth. Time to release some helium from your balloon and come back to terra firma.
Steve
PS. You liberal goofball. (I wanted you to get your shot of grappa. Bottom’s up!)
Very proud of you Steve, you passed – you successfully used a fact checking link that I provided (you didn’t thank me though) to check a fact. If you keep this up, we’ll let you into the republican liberal club. Giuliani will give you a hug. He’ll be easy to spot, as he’s wearing a dress.
Jared
Actually, Jared, I just threw your quote in Yahoo to see what came up. It got a Snopes hit near the top. Snopes is the king. It took about 15 seconds.
I’m not too impressed by your Factcheck.org. I leafed through a few of their posts. Based on that small sample, it looks like they brag more about being impartial than do actual research. From what I see, they snip off the extreme opinions and present a plausible slightly left of center position as the truth. By contrast, Snopes does the hard research to come up with the real answer, free of bias.
Steve
Steve and I clearly disagree on a number of issues.
Back to the topic. I’ve read through a few of articles on the current state of Iran’s foreign policy and the potential for violent conflict between them and the US. Here are two I found informative. They’re not too long, and both end with a guardedly hopeful view:
http://www.brookings.org/views/op-ed/daalder/20060421.htm
http://www.cfr.org/publication/10672/pause_over_iran_nuclear_intelligence.html
I’m getting very busy at work with some fun but challenging projects, so I’ll be absent for a while.
Jared
The New York Sun interprets Ahmadinejad’s letter as a declaration of war:
“President Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush, widely interpreted as a peaceful overture, is in fact a declaration of war. The key sentence in the letter is the closing salutation. In an eight-page text of the letter being circulated by the Council on Foreign Relations, it is left untranslated and rendered as “Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda.” What this means is “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.”
It is a phrase with historical significance in Islam, for, according to Islamic tradition, in year six of the Hejira – the late 620s – the prophet Mohammad sent letters to the Byzantine emperor and the Sassanid emperor telling them to convert to the true faith of Islam or be conquered. The letters included the same phrase that President Ahmadinejad used to conclude his letter to Mr. Bush. For Mohammad, the letters were a prelude to a Muslim offensive, a war launched for the purpose of imposing Islamic rule over infidels.”
http://www.nysun.com/article/32594
The awful evidence accumulates that Ahmadinejad and his masters are bent on taking Iran to war.
Steve
Mahmood, does this make sense to you? It is from the Inter Press News Service Agency.
MAY 2006 (IPS) – Given the fragmentation of Iran’s conservative ruling elite, the response of the major powers to Iran’s nuclear ambitions will greatly affect the outcome of the current power struggle inside the country — and by implication, the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme, write Dariush Zahedi, who teaches International Political Economy and Peace & Conflict Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and Ali Assareh, a student instructor and analyst specialising in the political economy of the Middle East at UC Berkeley.
In this analysis, the authors write that pursuing the military option would create a security environment conducive to the ascendancy of Ahmadinejad and the hard-liners, who would seize the opportunity to extinguish the remnants of Iran’s civil society and roll back reforms. Sanctions would damage Iran’s struggling private sector and minuscule middle class and weaken the position of the pragmatists relative to the hard-liners and traditionalists, who control Iran’s vast network of black markets.
Engaging Iran, on the other hand, would enhance the position of the pragmatists relative to other sub-factions. A normalisation of relations between the two countries would also lead to improvements in the condition of the economy. U.S. foreign investment could boost the development of the private sector in Iran and increase the size of its middle class. This process, in the long run, will further consolidate the position of the less ideological and more pragmatic elements within the conservatives, and could lay the foundations for a peaceful and sustained transition to democracy. (END/2006)
Of course Will and it makes sense too. Attack a country and national pride and ego would force everyone to stand with that who shouts loudest and the one who wants to cow ‘the great satan’, rather than them going to moderates who preach peaceful means of resolving conflicts.
Iran needs to be engaged to get this situation to peaceful resolution, no matter what the war theorists and agitators say.
Steve, not so. To me, the phrase “Al-salam ‘ala man ittaba’a al-huda” distinctly means “peace unto those who chose the path of God” and that by definition includes other people of the book: Christians and Jews (and some say Buddhists too).
So the translation you depend on is at the very best inaccurate and want to create a condition of animosity.