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

To: LindyBill who wrote (44977)	9/18/2002 12:21:10 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I am reminded of an exchange I saw on Inside Washington. The subject was some measure that was against gun control and generally for the right to bear arms. Jack Beatty and Nina Totenburg, noted that Bush had not been under any political pressure to support this measure and did not derive any obvious immediate benefit from it, supposed that he was tossing 'some red meat' to the true believers. Charles Krauthammer replied, "My dear incorrigible colleagues, you simply cannot believe that Bush ever does anything because he believes in it." There are a lot of people on the left who simply cannot believe that anyone, let alone W, could go to war because they believe it is the right thing to do for the country. So it has to be arrogance, machismo, revenge, politics, oil, group hysteria (see Alter's column in the Boston Globe today?), any other reason will do. Now of course, this being the real world, considerations of national advantage, politics and oil are not absent from the picture entirely. But I don't believe that any of them are the prime movers of affairs.

To: LindyBill who wrote (44977)	9/18/2002 10:06:32 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

Wow! Even at them times I was most disgusted with Clinton and his crew, I would never have described these type of motives to them. No chance that maybe they are people who love their country, want to serve it, and think this is the best way? It has to be a plot to "signal Cheney's old buddies?" Read Frances Fitzgerald's piece in the most recent New York Review of Books on this one. She is trying to see what is the most significant contrast on Iraq between the two Bush administrations. She gets her conclusion from a quote from Scowcroft to the effect that the first time around Cheney's was the odd voice out; this time around it's Powells (though that gets less clear). Just a little insight into the conflicts between Scowcroft and Cheney which still survive. Obviously, they are not good friends. I don't think that motive is anywhere near the strongest but I would not be surprised to find it there. These folk after all are as human as the rest of us and are thus just as capable of containing multiple, even contradictory, motives. I don't rule out the sense they would have that they are doing the "right thing" whatever that elusive creature is. Just that it's complicated with other motives, some of lesser light. All administrations, all public actors, are this way. Says me, coffee and breakfast behind me and with fascinating columns by Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman read. If no one else has posted them by the time I finish my run through the 6 zillion new posts, I'll put them up.