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

To: JohnM who wrote (48071)	9/29/2002 7:49:49 PM
From: Eashoa' M'sheekha	Respond to of 281500

Thanks For That John. " Yep, I recommend the book. ". OK. >>all of which nets out to a very confusing picture of what the leadership in each country wishes, what they are likely to do in different eventualities, etc<< I don't feel so bad now. -g- " Pollock argues for the necessity of invasion ". It may very well come to that, but at least the world will have tried to deal with him in what should be perceived as both a civilized and humanitarian way with plenty of opportunity for him to comply to the UN resolutions. I will strongly support military action if these proposals and agreements are not satisfied going forward, because as I stated during the " Jenin scenario ", if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to fear. My only concern now is if there will be a " shoot-out at the OK coral " before inspectors can have an opportunity to prove one side or the other. Let's hope cool heads prevail here since we have come this far, eh? Regards, KC

To: JohnM who wrote (48071)	9/30/2002 1:13:17 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Very interesting take on the Foreign Policy statement by the Admin. Worth a read, IMO. washingtonpost.com Bush's Foreign Policy First But no one seems to notice -- even at the White House. By Jackson Diehl Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A19 For a decade U.S. internationalists bemoaned the absence of any coherent policy for engaging the world after the fall of communism. The Clinton administration, like the Bush team before it, was excoriated for stumbling from crisis to crisis and for consistently making bad judgments about where and how to use America's sole-superpower strength. Now, at last, the internationalists have gotten what they wanted -- and the reaction of too many of them is to be aghast. The national security doctrine issued this month by the White House packs into just 34 pages everything the foreign policy of the 1990s lacked. It begins by embracing two facts that have been obvious since 1991, but hard for a democratic and sometimes insular society to accept: that America has unmatched and unprecedented power in the world and therefore no choice but to shape the international order; and that it faces threats that are utterly different but in some ways more dangerous than the threats from the old Soviet Union. The Bush doctrine commits the United States to act aggressively, with others or alone, "to promote a balance of power that favors freedom." The phobias about engaging abroad that paralyzed policy in the '90s, and infuriated the internationalists, are banished. This isn't just the Jacksonian assertion of American interests, though that is surely part of it. There is also a Wilsonian promise to "bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world" -- and a Kissingerian strategy of maintaining a "great power balance" that decisively favors the United States. The ambition is breathtaking: "We will work to translate this moment of influence," declares the doctrine, "into decades of peace, prosperity and liberty." It is, in short, a bold -- and mostly brilliant -- synthesis, one that conceivably could cause national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who executed it, to be remembered as the policymaker who defined a new era. The first proof that Rice and her team are on to something is the alarmist reactions that have greeted her paper. Scandalized members of the foreign policy establishment are calling its treatment of preemptive action an unprecedented policy departure that endorses blitzkrieg as the remedy for anti-Americanism. In a chat with National Public Radio, historian Douglas Brinkley claimed that it "is simply saying, 'We do what we want when we feel like it, and we will declare war on anybody if we think they might be declaring war on us.' " Policy perestroika usually provokes such first responses. But American presidents have been engaging in unilateral and preemptive military actions all along -- most recently in Panama, Grenada and Haiti, and in Iraq following the 1998 expulsion of the inspectors. And what the new policy actually says is this: Because terrorists and rogue dictators now have the potential to do enormous harm to Americans with weapons of mass destruction and are not easily deterred, it may be necessary to strike at some before they can act. Should we again sit still if a future al Qaeda operates large terrorist training camps in a future Afghanistan? Rice's document treats this question as "a matter of common sense," which it is. It also says, sensibly, that preemption is not the answer to all threats -- and so far, at least, it hasn't been the legal basis for the White House campaign against Iraq. That Colin Powell now is negotiating the text of another Security Council resolution on U.N. inspections with Russia, Syria and France points to the real weakness of the Bush doctrine -- not that it is too radical but that it lacks the political momentum needed to overcome decades of encrusted old thinking and bureaucratic inertia. It's not just that liberal academics haven't signed on to the new doctrine. Inside the administration, it's hard to find anyone -- other than Rice -- who subscribes to every part of it. Instead, some push the unilateral offense, some the democratic nation-building -- and no one quite gets his or her way. In practice, despite all the alarms, the administration's foreign policy, when not entirely paralyzed by internal infighting, mostly follows the old norms. George Kennan's theory of containment eventually won over challengers from the right and left, and thus became the consensus doctrine of the Cold War. Will Rice have the same luck? So far preemption is no more than a scary word used to motivate the United Nations -- which, at least in the case of Iraq, is perhaps its best use. Meanwhile, the real heart of the doctrine -- the proposition that U.S. strength be wielded to spread liberty through the world -- has been barely acknowledged by a policy apparatus that continues to cultivate old and new autocratic allies in the Middle East and Asia. Does George Bush really subscribe to the doctrine issued in his name? Ask Hosni Mubarak, or Pervez Musharraf. washingtonpost.com