<wonderful testament to the illogic of inspections ad-nauseum>
True.
There is a large part of the Peace camp, that has no clear idea of how to respond to 9/11. Doing nothing is unacceptable to the American people. Always has been, that trait is at the core of our national character. We sometimes do the wrong thing, but passively awaiting our fate is something we never do.
A lot of people/groups/governments in the Dove camp, were against inspections in Iraq (when the choice was inspections or nothing), and especially against consequences for failure of Iraq to allow inspections. This shows either confused thinking, or insincerity. As a Dove, I wish this wasn't so, but an honest reading of many of my fellow Doves, is that they are DoNothings. Especially Europeans.
Opinion has become sharply polarized, just in the last several weeks. Opinion polls show 70% of Americans now support the war, while 90% of people in Muslim nations continue to oppose it. The more polarized opinion becomes, the more Force will be the First/Last/Only resort, used by all sides. This path is, literally, a DeadEnd, for both sides. It doesn't get us to a resolution, it doesn't get us to peace, except "the peace of the graveyard." The NeoCon hope of imposing our will by force (or the threat of force) on the entire Muslim world, is as delusional as the Arab hope of "pushing the Jews into the sea."
I'm making a list, of specific steps for American Doves to advocate, an Alternative (whining and DoNothing, and especially anti-American attitudes, will convince nobody). So far, the list is:
Blueprint For Victory:
1. 10% Force; 90% persuasion (instead of the other way around). Economic leverage, HeartsAndMinds campaign.
2. Multilateralism. Alone, we lose.
3. Strict Reciprocity (with Intermittent Forgiveness), when dealing with hostile nations/organizations. No preventive wars. Recognize that Containment/Deterrance worked with Stalin and Mao, and will probably work with Iran and N. Korea also.
4. Mean it, when we say we support Freedom and Democracy. Nobody outside the U.S. believes us, when our leaders say they are the global champions of those ideals. The reason is, so often this is just PR, and the reality is we form close alliances with despotic medieval theocracies like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. Words have to match actions, or we are seen everywhere as hypocrites.
5. Address the reasons we are hated in so much of the world, rather than just angrily dismissing their complaints and then trying to hammer foreign peoples into submission. Force, especially Force used alone, will increase, not decrease, the support for terrorists throughout the world. Every dead Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian civilian, equals one more recruit for Al Queda.
6. "Let a thousand flowers bloom". Try everything we can think of (that doesn't involve killing people). Fund them, then evaluate them after a year or two, weed out the ones that don't work, expand the ones that do.
7. Take the money we are spending on preventive war (75B$ just for Iraq, just this year, and the total cost will probably be much higher), and spend it on things that separate the guerrillas (Al Queda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.) from their civilian base of support. All those run social service organizations, that provide schools, hospitals, food, to Muslims. Then they use those organizations, as a cover for propaganda and recruitment and financing. We need to shut them down, by providing an alternative. Shutting them down, without providing an alternative, will just create more despair and anger against us.
8. Manhattan Project for Energy Independence, to end reliance on energy supplied by unstable regions (Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria). This will end the need to garrison the ME oil fields. And kick the legs out from under 20 dictators.
9. Fund, through proxies, a system of madrassahs throughout the world, that preach non-violent Islamic education. Shut down, everywhere we can reach, madrassahs that preach violent Jihad.
10. Start following the Geneva Convention; give Guantanamo "illegal combatants" POW status. Let U.S. soldiers abroad be judged by local law, and by international courts. Join the ICC; if we don't like the structure of this international Court to try war criminals, then we should fix it, rather than dissing it.
11. Stop agricultural trade restraints, and subsidies to wealthy corporate American farmers, which is the #1 thing we do that causes poverty in the developing world.
12. Sign the Kyoto treaty. Even if you are not an environmentalist, this makes sense, as it really pissed off the whole world when we didn't sign it.
13. Reform the UN, rather than dissing it.
14. Sunshine; follow the lead of S. Korea re the North. The quickest route to Regime Change in N. Korea, is to engage them, integrate them into the Global Village, encourage the widest possible exchange of people/goods/capital/ideas across the border. Do nothing to reinforce their Seige Mentality (or ours).
15. Use our leverage to Engage in the Israeli-Arab conflict; become a true "honest broker" for peace, rather than 100% backing Sharon. Make U.S. aid dependant on dismantling illegal/small/isolated/new Israeli settlements.
16. Insist on an Exit Plan, when U.S. troops are sent to foreign conflicts. No open-ended Tar Babies, like Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, where our soldiers are committed forever but can't Fix the problem. The best cure for Quagmires is Prevention. |
