2006 1
What is it about the Middle East?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
US Foreign Policy is mainly focused on the Middle East. So it´s Spain´s. Both countries have strong historical and economics ties to Latin America. Both should focus on the region. None of them do. Latin America, 560 million people, GDP of $2.3 trillion dollars. Israel and the Palestinian Territories, 10 million people, GDP of $140bn. No comparison. Oil reserves? Venezuela´s are almost as high as those of Iraq. Wonder how Hugo Chavez is doing so well promoting his foreign policy around Latin America? Look at where the foreign ministers of USA and Spain spend most of their time. America and in a smaller scale Spain have created a power vaccum in the region and now Chavez clones are sprouting in the region with unexpected results.
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Francisco on May 2, 2006 ·
I think there is not such a trade-off. We -Spaniards- can try to help in both worlds. Actually we are one of the countries in the world that donates more money per capita to develop other countries, and no Spaniards comply about it.
I understand your point of the link between Spain and Latin-America, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more grave in terms of injustice, political/international bias, and forward-looking relationships with arab countries, and with developing countries in general.
Most people in Spain feel that Palestinians have systematically been betrayed by the international community. The conflict is lasting so much, and is costing so many lives -specially for the Palestinian side- that I do not find a way to rationally explain how the international community has not adopted more inflexible determinations.
Please let the Spainirds keep on their way to play international polictics.
Cheers
Francisco, from Madrid, Spain
P.D.: I honestly think it is really meritful the way (and pacience) two countries intervine in the conflict: Germany and Spain. For example, both countries built the Gaza airport in the hope it would serve the palestinians to begin trading abroad and focus on their own prosperity. Well, Israel decided the airport was plenty of terrorists and that the only way to find them was to completily destroy it… they probably thought the terrorists self-buried under the landing track, or were hidden inside the holes of the bricks i guess…
Another example: When Israel began to recover autonomous land arguing that the palestinian police was not covering terrorists (the Palestinian Police argued that they did not have means after Israeli bombings over their facilities…), the Spanish goverment offered to send Spanish police to carry out the tasks. That way there would be no need of another invasion and the police would be a sort of independent, international, non-palestinian corps. Israel said symply no and begam more attacks.