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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (19525)	2/21/2002 1:04:51 AM
From: tekboy	Respond to of 281500

yup. as an example, by the way, of the kind of inside baseball some people engage in, this guy tonight responded to my skepticism by saying, "if they weren't going to do this, why would they have announced the [March] Cheney trip back in February?" the reasoning here is as follows: the admin knows the folks in the region won't sign on unless they already know we're going forward; the trip will be a failure unless they sign on; and the admin wouldn't deliberately set themselves up for such a highly visible failure. Hence, the decision to announce the trip was a signal of another, larger decision about Iraq. The same thing goes for the rhetoric: they know that the rhetoric they're using will blow up in their faces unless they back it up with action, and so they wouldn't be using such rhetoric unless they had already decided on the action (except for the details, that is). My response to all this was that it made perfect sense if one assumed a unitary rational actor behind the administration's behavior. If one believed that the administration was torn between two powerful camps, however, each of whom could have an input but neither of whom could dictate policy by itself, then one might interpret the behavior recently. I agree, by the way, that if they don't in fact do something big on Iraq now, they will look really stupid and leave themselves open to a lot of criticism. tb@wheelswithinwheels.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (19525)	2/22/2002 7:53:12 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

If he asked "Do you think we should go after the mob?", the answer would be "oh no, there're not a problem" because the store owner would be thinking, I'm on the front line, I'm going to get the blame, and this guy doesn't even sound sure or like he knows what he's doing. But if the DA said, "Listen, we ARE going after this guy, you want to be on the right side or the wrong side of the law?", then he'll get cooperation. And what if there is a problem - the store owner is on the front line, after all, and he might even know the situation better than the new DA... the second approach pretty well guarantees that the storekeeper isn't going to say 'hold on, consider these facts first please'. 'With me or against me' is a great sound-bite but absolutely dire in the real, non-Aristotlean world.