Nice list, Jacob. I'm all for Doves advocating real alternatives to the Whine & DoNothing program. It's hardly healthy not to have a working opposition.
However, I must nit pick a few items that you list as givens. Particularly:
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.
This last conclusion is hardly so certain as you make it. It is pretty clear that that AQ et. al. used a set of interlocking factors to recruit, among which are: a) the failure of Arab regimes b) the perception that Arab regimes were backed by the West c) the fact that the mosque was the only available arena for political dissent d) the ascendancy of Qutb's ideas as the only set of Arab political ideas that had not been tried and proven failures e) the perception (fostered by 20 years of weak responses) that America was a paper tiger, seemingly strong but with a glass jaw, unable to take casualties, which led to f) the perception that AQ et. al. were strong and on the rise.
Now, since we are fighting a bunch of Arab perceptions, many of which are notably untethered to reality, it is not certain how they will respond to our action. But it's just as fair a guess to say that we will explode the idea that we are weak & decandant and can easily be made to run, as to say that every civilian we kill will make a new recruit for AQ.
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.
Nobody else ratified it either, Jacob, they just used it for political cover. While I don't think that the Bush administration's handling of the affair was very bright, signing this POS now would hardly mend matters - and the Senate still wouldn't ratify it.
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.
Great idea! got any practical suggestions? - say for dealing with Saudi Arabia - the author of all those jihad-teaching madrassahs you want to shut down? |
