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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (19581)	2/22/2002 2:22:37 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I sure hope your guy is totally wrong on this one as it implies a very worrisome level of obliviousness. Did everybody in the White House have amnesia about the reaction Reagan got when he called the Soviet Union "an evil empire"? You sure your friend isn't projecting his wishes onto the situation? If President Bush didn't mean any change of policy on Iraq, then he's certainly been talking loudly and carrying a very small stick. My impression of Bush has been that he is politically disciplined, limits his initiatives, and stays on-message. I expected mistakes due to inexperience and an oil company-centered worldview, but not due to big talk and unfocused rhetoric. we shall see, we shall see... the first guy's argument is "Bush may not be an impressive intellectual, but he's an impressive politician, and he would know that by saying such stuff he's setting himself up for a fall if he can't back it up." (i.e., he agrees with you) the second guy's argument is "many of these guys are indeed kooks, or domestic political hacks who don't know squat about foreign policy, and the internal administration shenanigans are a kind of amateur-hour show at the moment, with hard-liners of various degrees of intelligence riding high and the moderates too scared or weak to challenge them." Frankly, from where I sit both views have some validity, so it's hard to interpret what's actually happening. Oddly enough, the first guy doesn't favor an Iraq attack and the second guy does, so their different perceptions can't be attributed to simple bias. One reason for the difference in their views might be that the second guy is more junior than the first, so his view is more that of a lower-echelon-crowd. From that vantage point things always look screwed up (after all, if staffers felt their bosses were doing a good job, what would they bitch about?), and it's possible that's clouding his judgment. time, perhaps, will tell. Very interesting to watch. tb@curiouserandcuriouser.com