the Doran essay is an aesthetic gem ... the Betts essay .. really needed a good kick
Funny. I wonder if that might have something to do with the fact that the first author is still a young nobody and the second an older, bigger shot who is able to fend off intervention with his prose. Nah, that couldn't be it, of course...
the Betts point which makes the most sense to me, given the obvious commitments of this administration to an invasion, is to ask why more has not been done to educate the public about the dangers of WMD in the US, if Saddam senses complete defeat.
I generally agree with your analysis here, altho I'm not nearly as worried on this score as Betts is (no real reason, just a gut feeling).
Doran's argument...is fairly familiar, at least the portion that deals with Palestine as symbol in the Arab world. Makes sense. ...However, it's not at all clear that the dichotomy Doran poses is quite so sharp. [what about] an argument that says whether [or not] such efforts could produce a settlement, the visible effort of making them helps reduce the anger at the US[?}
This is similar to the comment from a friend re Doran that I posted myself the other day. It is certainly plausible, as you say--but I suppose Doran's argument would be that what you gain by such actions is more than offset by what you lose, which is basically the reputation for being unmaumauable. At the end of the day, he probably feels, that reputation is indispensable in forcing others to cave on the points most important to you.
Since I can see the logic of both cases, I would hate to have to choose between them, and in practice therefore I would probably try to wimp out and split the difference--trying to pressure the Israelis just enough to dispel the notion that I was their poodle and thus helping to pacify some of our Arab allies, while not going so far with that pressure that the Pals and the Arabs more generally decide we'll do their job for them and thus they don't have to make painful compromises of their own. I'm not sure this would satisfy anybody, but it might well keep the situation on the back burner until after the Iraq stuff was done and pave the way for any post-Iraq intervention plans I might have.
The ability to make such judgment calls correctly more often than not is the kind of thing that separates the (luckier?) hall-of-fame professionals from the good-but-not-great ones. Unfortunately we can't really bottle the quality, and being right one day doesn't guarantee you'll be right the next. So given that the stakes are so high here, whichever decision I took I would make sure to remain open-minded and monitor the situation carefully so I could make a mid-course correction if the results of my decision were unappealing.
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