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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (45897)	9/21/2002 2:22:09 PM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Sept. 20, 2002 \| The question that tore America apart long after Congress passed the seemingly innocuous Tonkin Gulf resolution -– What is the purpose of this bloody conflict? -– must be answered now about the Bush administration's rapid drive toward war in Iraq. At the risk of alienating those on both sides of the debate, I have to say that so far, only a single convincing rationale for the president's policy has been argued. It isn't to secure oil, although Baghdad does control the second-richest proven petroleum reserves in the world. Saddam Hussein has been perfectly willing to sell his country's oil, and permit development of those reserves, for decades. And until he misunderstood that strange message from the first President Bush's ambassador in 1990, and decided to invade Kuwait, American policymakers and industrial leaders like Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger were perfectly willing to do business with him. (Which also suggests, despite all the recent manufactured angst in Washington, that his gassing of the Kurds and Iranians during the 1980s is also not the reason for our elites' hostility toward his regime.) It isn't to stop aggression, because Saddam has remained inside his box for a decade, since the end of the Gulf War. (Back then I supported Desert Storm as an unavoidable international response to Saddam's violation of a United Nations member state's sovereignty. Many aspects of that war and the propaganda surrounding it were, however, repugnant.) Baghdad's neighbors fear the consequences of an American invasion far more than they fear Saddam, his weakened army or his depleted arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. It isn't because he's really Hitler. As tensions grow, far-fetched historical analogies are being tossed around. That German minister's remarks comparing Bush to the Nazi dictator were vile and stupid -- but for all his brutal criminality and national-socialistic ideology, Saddam isn't quite Hitler either. He lacks the Nazi dictator's methods and ambitions, not to mention his means. Postwar Iraq hardly resembles prewar Germany. By the time the United States entered the war against the Axis, Hitler's war machine had been conquering Europe for five years. It isn't to boost war profiteering. Under Bush the Pentagon budget is to be set on maximum bloat anyway, with "missile defense" slated to enrich Republican contributors and impoverish the rest of us. Military "reform" plus "homeland security" offer plenty of opportunities for conservative-style waste, fraud and abuse. The Carlyle Group, Halliburton and the rest of the Bush-Cheney industrial complex will do fine without blowing $200 million in another desert war It certainly isn't to prevent proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, current U.S. policy is actually designed to thwart completion of a new international regime against biological weapons. The Bush hawks aren't too keen on multilateral action to prevent proliferation of chemical weapons, and they've been slow to deal with the truly mind-boggling problem of unsecured and stray fissile material in the former Soviet states. If these issues were keeping Dick Cheney and Richard Perle awake at night, American policy would be quite different. The recent International Institute for Strategic Studies report often quoted to justify immediate intervention is a fairly measured assessment of the situation. Among its findings are that "Iraq has probably retained a small force of about a dozen 650km range al-Husseinmissiles. These could strike Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Kuwait [and could] be armed with [chemical or biological] warheads ... Iraq does not possess facilities to produce long range missiles and it would require several years and extensive foreign assistance to construct such facilities." Are we going to war to take out 12 medium-range missiles? It isn't even to keep Saddam from going nuclear. The IISS report found that "Iraq does not possess facilities to produce fissile material in sufficient amounts for nuclear weapons. It would require several years and extensive foreign assistance to build such fissile material production facilities." Only if Iraq managed to obtain a sufficient amount of black-market weapons-grade uranium could a bomb conceivably be constructed. Saddam has been trying to do exactly that for 12 years without success. According to the best estimates, Iran's nuclear program is more threatening, and North Korea's missile program is much more advanced -- yet there seems to be no immediate imperative for "regime change" in those countries. Nobody believes Iraq can build an atomic bomb, or construct a long-range ballistic missile, between now and Election Day. That leaves us with the last, most plausible reason for the Bush team's sudden decision to press for war: because it is the best way to mobilize public opinion behind the president and his domestic political objectives, notably preserving his party's strength on Capitol Hill. The Democrats may lack the courage to say this, but they know that it's true. The world may someday have ample reason to overthrow Saddam violently, and that day may come soon. But for now, the partisan stampede toward war ought to be resisted in favor of a strong new inspection regime backed by force. [1:52 p.m. PDT, Sept. 20, 2002] salon.com Conason Nadine, I'll get back to you on Line item veto.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (45897)	9/21/2002 2:35:48 PM
From: Rascal	Respond to of 281500

Line Item Veto's demise was very hush hush! August 6, 1998 Save the Line Item Veto by Stephen Moore Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute. The Supreme Court has now ruled the line item veto unconstitutional. The pro-spending lobby in Washington is uncorking bottles of champagne. But oddly enough, there is quiet celebration on Capitol Hill as well -- among Democrats and Republicans alike -- now that pork projects all over the country will now be spared presidential cancellation. In fact, last December, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), long the prince of pork on Capitol Hill, declared that if the court strikes down the line item veto, it would be "my Christmas wish come true." Merry Christmas, Sen. Byrd. Unfortunately, Congress's gain is the taxpayers' loss. One year's experience with the line item veto taught us all an important lesson: the line item veto works. In 1997 President Clinton used this new veto 82 times to delete unnecessary expenditures in 11 spending bills. The savings to taxpayers total nearly $2 billion over five years. True, in a $1.75 trillion annual budget, this is not a huge sum. But even by Washington standards, $2 billion is still real money -- and a whole lot of pork. None of these vetoed projects served the national interest. Clinton wielded the veto to eliminate funding for a $600,000 solar aquatic wastewater treatment demonstration project in Vermont; a $2 million Chena River dredging project in Fairbanks, Alaska, to benefit a single tour boat operator; a $1 million corporate welfare grant to the Carter County Montana Chamber of Commerce; $900,000 for a Veterans Administration cemetery the VA says it doesn't need; $1.9 million for dredging a Mississippi lake that primarily serves yachts and pleasure boats; $500,000 for the Neabsco Creek Project in Virginia for removal of creek debris; and other such absurdities. As the list below shows, pork is still being served in great quantities and large servings in Washington these days. The tragedy of the Supreme Court's decision is that the most recent spending bill enacted by Congress, the 1998 Highway Bill, is a monument to the need for a line item veto. This roads bill contains a record 1,500 pork projects. That's 3 slabs of bacon for every congressional district. These "demonstration projects" include such necessities as bike paths, hiking trails, auto museums, parking garages and wasteful mass transit projects. More than $5 billion could have been saved on this bill alone with the line item veto. The American public has long favored the line item veto precisely to purge the budget of exactly this kind of irresponsible spending. The only problem with Bill Clinton's use of the line item veto is that he used it too sparingly. Bill Clinton had the opportunity to terminate hundreds of other preposterous spending items with billions of dollars of additional savings. The 1998 Energy and Water bill, for example, contained 423 unrequested projects -- conveniently, just about one for every district. Clinton cancelled just 8 of them. Most of the other 415 deserved the same fate. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) have done heroic work in exposing billions of dollars of obnoxious items in last year's spending bills. Why, for instance, didn't the president cancel the $286,000 for research to enhance the flavor of roasted peanuts? Or the $250,000 for pickle research? Or the $700,000 to build an "aquatic and fitness center" at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pa.? Or the $1.35 million to renovate the Paramount Theater in Rutland, Vt.? Or the $2 million for the renovation of an art gallery in Buffalo? Or the $500,000 for the study of livestock pollution (cow dung) at Tarleton State University? Or . . . well, you get the point. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Supreme Court has ruled this particular version of the line item veto unconstitutional. But it has not said that the line item veto is de facto unconstitutional. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Supreme Court has ruled this particular version of the line item veto unconstitutional. But it has not said that the line item veto is de facto unconstitutional. Congress can and should immediately enact a version that will pass constitutional muster. The line item veto is fixable. But will a Republican Congress reenact the line item veto now that they have seen many of their own strips of bacon pulled from bills? To their credit, they kept their promise to enact a line item veto in 1996 even though the first president to use it would be their adversary, Bill Clinton. Many GOP lawmakers have turned against the item veto since then not because it has failed, but because it has worked all too well. If Republicans still believe in fiscal sanity and tightfistedness in government, they will find a way to enact a constitutional item veto -- a power that 43 governors have. On its merits, the line item deserves to be preserved. The critics were wrong: we now have documented evidence showing that the line item veto does save money; it does repel preposterous spending projects that offend the sensibilities of taxpayers. My estimates are that a president that looks more skeptically at waste in government than Bill Clinton -- someone like, say, Ronald Reagan -- could save taxpayers about $5 billion a year with a line item veto. But it is precisely because the item veto saves money and repels pork that members of Congress -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- will not be inclined to let this genie out of the bottle ever again. cato.org