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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: stockman_scott who wrote (46636)	9/24/2002 3:04:48 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) of 281500

Misspeak by Peter Beinart The New Republic Issue date 09.30.02 Several of his points strike me as telling. I'm surprised I find stuff in The New Republic helpful. But there you go. In his speech on Thursday, Bush declared, "We want the United Nations to be effective and respected and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced." But this is nonsense. While the Bush administration wants enforcement of U.N. resolutions on Iraq, it has no broader interest in an "effective and respected" United Nations. In fact, the Bush administration has spent the last 20 months making sure the U.N. is ineffective. This is exactly correct, and it may well serve to undermine the speech over the coming months. It was too clever. And may well cost the Bushies down the road. No one will believe their rhetoric about making the UN relevant. But the bigger problem with Bush's speech isn't that he embraced a false rationale for war, it's that he obscured the real one. By suggesting that America's causus belli is Saddam's violations of U.N. resolutions, Bush raised a number of previously ignored--and entirely unconvincing--pretexts for war. It's a little like the high school debating technique in which students think they win by simply making more arguments rather than improving their arguments. So reason one doesn't work, let's come up with reasons two through ten. Above all, it means clearly confronting the most serious critique of the administration's preemption doctrine: that Saddam can be deterred. The Bush administration has not adequately explained that Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. And this is precisely the right point. The longer we go without serious arguments on this point, the harder the views become, and the less likely the Bush folk are to persuade the doubtful. That window is closing fast.

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