Peace Terms Quotes
The Boer war broke out when the Afrikaners of the Transvaal would not give suffrage and equality to the new British immigrants . However, Blacks were in even worse shape in the Transvaal. The British Colonial Minister had urged reform in this arena, but the British had fought an ugly war and settled for a non-Black Reform, platform assuring suffrage and other rights for the white English but assuring nothing for the Blacks. This set the stage for apartheid. In the settlement of the Boer War, England would not prolong the fighting and the casualties to gain civil and equal rights for the Black population which they had argued for and was one of the causes of the war. Just what Chamberlain warned about came to pass.
Vladimir Lenin
The so called War on Terror had many lessons. President Obama and many of the military leaders in the Pentagon realized that just as we evolved the concept of a Cold War, a new concept was needed to deal on the long run with the Al Qaeda terrorists. Typically in war, the nation is fully mobilized with the surrender of the enemy the major objective. When peace is negotiated, there is some demobilization and other things begin to take precedence. However, given the non state highly decentralized nature of Al Qaeda, there is no way to ever negotiate peace because no Al Qaeda official can speak for any more than his immediate cell and cadre. They will likely never stop attacking in any foreseeable future since their motivation is ideological and religious. It doesn’t take full military mobilization to protect against individual acts of terrorism, and indeed arguably the large mobilization only gives the terrorists more nearby targets. So American leaders were evolving a state of high protection, surgical strikes and attacks on Al Qaeda leadership and cells, and at the same time a demobilization of many of the overseas ground troops. It is not a state of war yet there will be attacks from time to time against us and attacks by us on Al Qaeda, yet there cannot be an all out war which is de factor non winnable in toto, but is very controllable. For Stein and other hawks, this new state is unfathomable. If there is any attack on Americans or American interests to them we are either at war with full mobilization or have surrendered. The total number of American civillians killed in the 10 year war on terror has been less than 2 months of normal automobile crash deaths or 3 months worth of gun accidents, or one tenth of the deaths caused by flu in a single year.
This illustrates one of the reasons that the Israeli Arab conflict has been unsolvable over the years. A thousand years ago, the Arabs were a leading intellectual and military power in the world. The rest of the world has moved ahead and they have actually retrogressed. So the Arabs seek dignity which is very elusive. They have never wanted to negotiate terms with Israel when they have been weak and feel defeated. So the pattern has been that they feel they cannot negotiate for justice as they are too week. So periodically they attack Israel which has always defeated them and hoped that after the Arab defeat, permanent negotiations for peace could take place. But the Arabs were feeling too weak. So they just repeated all their extreme demands. After a few years, they would try another attack, lose again and the cycle would repeat. The Israelis fear that if the Arabs every won a war, the Arab moderates might be willing to reasonably negotiate, the extremists would want to continue the fighting and “drive the Israelis into the sea” as they have so often threatened.
