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

To: carranza2 who wrote (41389)	9/1/2002 3:42:03 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I started this end of the discussion because I suspected that you do not appreciate the fact that Bush is legally empowered to attack Iraq upon his finding that Iraq harbored AQ. You've convinced me that I'm right on the point. It's clear to me that W is statutorily authorized to attack Iraq should he find that it harbored AQ. Glad to be of help. But I don't consider this a game. I'll try one more illustration with you and then I assume we can just agree to disagree without either of us thinking the issue is winning or losing. If someone robs a home in my neighborhood, crawls over the hedge in back, tries to hide on my property, and is captured by the local police, I'm not guilty of "harboring." But if I see that happening, know this person robbed a home, and don't call the police, or, worse still, try to hide the person, then I'm clearly "harboring." The absence of something like the latter makes the application of the statute problematic, at best, to the Iraqi case. Unless we learn more. As for politics and statutes, I hate to disabuse you of this but all statutes have political meanings. Look at the process by which they get created--the amount of lobbying that goes into the creation; look at the compromises that go into final versions--depends on the relative poltical clout of persons and parties. Finally, look at the interpretations through which they are applied. Best illustration of the moment is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill and the interpretations of the meaning of it by the Federal Elections Commission. Politics is not an unhappy accident in the creation of legislation; it is the very heart of it, for better or worse.