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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (46636)	9/24/2002 2:43:42 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

Your link also said this a couple of hours ago:09.24.02 tnr.com Editor's Note: We're pleased to announce a major addition to The New Republic Online, a daily online journal we've dubbed "&c." Our hope is to provide rapid-response, bite-sized commentary with the same critical voice and eye readers have come to expect from TNR. HACKWORK? Was Al Gore's thumping of the administration's Iraq policy yesterday politically motivated? Of course it was. For months the left wing of the Democratic Party has accused Gore of being AWOL when it came to criticizing George W. Bush. At the same time, Gore risked being marginalized by developments in Congress, where leading Democrats have begun falling in line with Bush on Iraq. The timing of his comments must obviously be evaluated in that context. But all politicians are politically motivated. The more important question is whether Gore was being cynical--that is, saying something he didn't believe for political gain. And on that question the answer isn't so clear. On the one hand, Gore did say in February that winning the war on terrorism would require a "final reckoning" with Saddam, suggesting he doesn't really think that attacking Iraq and rounding up terrorists are as incompatible as he implied yesterday. On the other hand, Gore does raise a legitimate point, one that probably resonates broadly even outside the left wing of the Democratic party: Attacking Iraq now would drain resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. (And, not to dwell too much on semantics, but the man did say final reckoning, not "early reckoning" or "intermediate reckoning.") At the very least, this is a point worth considering. But whatever the answer to the question of Gore's cynicism, he was certainly being less cynical than the Democratic leadership in Congress. It was these same Democrats, you may recall, whose only position on Iraq prior to last week were timid calls for more debate. Then all of a sudden, having realized that action on Iraq was more or less inevitable, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt decided that a "debate" wasn't so important after all. What was important was passing a congressional resolution as quickly as possible, giving Democrats ample time to get back to get back to their talking points on prescription drugs and Social Security, which they see as the surest way to pad their vote totals in November. According to one party official quoted in The Washington Post, "Daschle put a pin in the Iraq balloon [by agreeing to an early vote on a resolution]. It is not going to be a divisive, polarizing issue for the elections." The problem, of course, is that Daschle and Gephardt presumably still have reservations about attacking Iraq. In fact, many of the questions they're probably asking in private are the ones Gore just raised in public. Isn't this the very definition of cynicism?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (46636)	9/24/2002 3:04:48 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Misspeak by Peter Beinart The New Republic Issue date 09.30.02 Several of his points strike me as telling. I'm surprised I find stuff in The New Republic helpful. But there you go. In his speech on Thursday, Bush declared, "We want the United Nations to be effective and respected and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced." But this is nonsense. While the Bush administration wants enforcement of U.N. resolutions on Iraq, it has no broader interest in an "effective and respected" United Nations. In fact, the Bush administration has spent the last 20 months making sure the U.N. is ineffective. This is exactly correct, and it may well serve to undermine the speech over the coming months. It was too clever. And may well cost the Bushies down the road. No one will believe their rhetoric about making the UN relevant. But the bigger problem with Bush's speech isn't that he embraced a false rationale for war, it's that he obscured the real one. By suggesting that America's causus belli is Saddam's violations of U.N. resolutions, Bush raised a number of previously ignored--and entirely unconvincing--pretexts for war. It's a little like the high school debating technique in which students think they win by simply making more arguments rather than improving their arguments. So reason one doesn't work, let's come up with reasons two through ten. Above all, it means clearly confronting the most serious critique of the administration's preemption doctrine: that Saddam can be deterred. The Bush administration has not adequately explained that Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. And this is precisely the right point. The longer we go without serious arguments on this point, the harder the views become, and the less likely the Bush folk are to persuade the doubtful. That window is closing fast.