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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (36495)	8/8/2002 1:32:24 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Richard Falk's essay in The Nation is very much to the point. This argument should have been more prominent in the Senate hearings.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (36495)	8/9/2002 2:04:34 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi stockman_scott; Re war with Iraq. While I'm sure that there will be no war, (in the sense of an occupation of Baghdad), I'd prefer it that the administration quit talking about it. It's important for international relations that countries know that if they keep their feces within their own border, the world community will protect them from attacks by other countries. Iraq has made mistakes in the past and has been punished severely for those mistakes. But it's too late to continue the march to Baghdad without further provocation, and the response to that provocation would have to be commensurate with the provocation. By talking up an unprovoked war it makes the US look as if it were on the cusp of committing what is essentially a war crime, launching an unprovoked, (or in this case insufficiently provoked), attack upon another state. With the world's only superpower *appearing* to be out of control, it's easy to predict that the smaller nations are going to try to solve their national security problems with nuclear weapons. It would be a better world if those nations could, like Kuwait, instead rely on the US to show up to put the aggressors back across their borders. I think the reasons for the Bush administration recalcitrance (in the face of zero support from our traditional allies or from the countries actually in the path of Iraqi aggression, other than Israel) are the following: (1) The US has a strong tendency to make diplomacy personal. In short, it's Saddam's history. (2) The Iraqi regime is dictatorial in the left leaning (i.e. socialist / communist theory) rather than right leaning. If the Democrats were in power we'd be pushing over right wing dictatorships like Haiti. By the way, pushing over Haiti was just as bad as pushing over Iraq. It may work out better, (it helps that Haiti is surrounded mostly by water rather than countries that are begging us not to invade), but the same international lesson is still present: The US will use force to decide how another country's internal affairs are conducted. To avoid this, it's best to follow the Pakistani / Indian / Chinese / USSR example and get nuclear weapons. -- Carl P.S. Interesting link: Clinton and Coercive Diplomacy: A Study of Haiti wws.princeton.edu