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

To: JohnM who wrote (59882)	12/4/2002 7:35:37 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush: a liberator or conqueror? By Pat M. Holt Commentary > Opinion The Christian Science Monitor from the December 05, 2002 edition WASHINGTON – Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has been looking for a foreign policy to replace the cold war. On Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush found a meaningful one that American people endorsed overwhelmingly and enthusiastically. So with some help, mainly from NATO countries, the US overthrew a fanatic Muslim government in Afghanistan. It remains unclear what the US did to the Al Qaeda terrorists behind the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. From the beginning, Mr. Bush made it clear that the war on terror extended wherever terror showed itself or found sanctuary. This included the Philippines, Indonesia, and Yemen, among others. He grouped Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in an "axis of evil" and vowed to produce a regime change in Iraq, something his father left undone at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He professes to be open-minded about method, but his language is remarkably bellicose. This is a good way to get overextended. Consider the example of Vietnam. The UN Security Council voted unanimously to resume its search for weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological - in Iraq. The government of Saddam Hussein, which four years ago expelled inspectors, welcomed them back. The first week of inspections - likely to be a long process - has passed largely uneventfully. At the same time, the Bush administration has begun to line up allies for an invasion. This may be only psychological pressure on Hussein; it may be military preparation; it may be both. In one speech or interview after another, the president has changed his mind or contradicted himself. He campaigned for an end to nation-building, but is now rebuilding in Afghanistan and promises more in Iraq where we are not even at war yet. He sees war in ideological as well as geopolitical terms; war has a humanitarian as well as a military side. That is why humanitarian aid accompanies destruction. He wants to be seen as a liberator as well as a conqueror. In September, Bush in effect told the UN to help the US against Iraq or it would do it alone. Later, preceding the Security Council vote, he was more conciliatory. There are disagreements of varying degrees between the president, the vice president, State and Defense departments, the national security adviser, and Joint Chiefs of Staff. It will require a high degree of loyalty and self-discipline to get through this war on terror without a major rift (as between the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and President Johnson over Vietnam) or resignation (as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance over the Iran hostage rescue attempt). Reports are coming from civilians in the Pentagon of new military technology so awesome it almost makes it tempting to go to war on the way to establishing a worldwide military empire. Possibly encouraged by how easy it sounds, Bush even asserts the right to act preemptively. This is something the US was careful to avoid even during the cold war, when the danger was greater. But suppose this rosy vision turns out to be mistaken. A new book, "The End of the American Era" by Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown University international relations professor, argues that the challenge to the US will come not from Islam or China, but from Europe. And it will be economic. This recalls the hullaballoo in Europe a generation ago caused by the French book "Le Défi Americain" (The American Challenge) by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, making the same prediction in reverse - that a threat to Europe came from US economic and technological development. In considering US policy with respect to how far to carry the war on terrorism, Bush might well consider the guidepost of one of his predecessors. In an 1821 Fourth of July speech, John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, said: "Whenever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall by unfurled, there will be America's heart.... But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." At least Adams, who became president, did not overextend himself as did several of his successors. George W. Bush is in danger of adding his name to the list. • Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. csmonitor.com

To: JohnM who wrote (59882)	12/4/2002 7:58:38 PM
From: FaultLine	Respond to of 281500

I'll consider it but would rather Ken do it and be the monitor. (g) Oh yeah, 'Let's let Ken do it'... :o( --fl@whotheh#%%isken?.com

To: JohnM who wrote (59882)	12/4/2002 10:23:08 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hey, John! Here is an appointment that I love, (and will drive you nuts!) I hope Debka is right. >>>Elliott Abrams, who as Reagan team member was involved in Iran-contra affair, is appointed special assistant to President Bush and head of National Security Council Middle East section The appointment makes him White House point-man on Arab-Israel issues and US peace policy<<<<

To: JohnM who wrote (59882)	12/5/2002 12:39:45 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hoagland on the Antiwar problem. This is what cost the Dems so much in the election, IMO. washingtonpost.com The Out-of-Sync Antiwar Movement By Jim Hoagland Thursday, December 5, 2002; Page A35 Nancy Pelosi is a liberal politician who has helped inject morality and human rights into foreign affairs. Amnesty International has played an even larger role in that positive development. But they and other parts of the anti-imperialist, anti-establishment left they represent now sound out of sync with a world changed by international terrorism. There have been few sharper or clearer critics of the abuse of citizens by China's communist leaders than Pelosi, a Democrat from San Francisco who recently became the House minority leader. But as I listened to her during a recent television interview deflect serious questions about the rights and wrongs of going to war in Iraq to end crimes against humanity there, I wondered where her voice had gone. Amnesty International has a long, honorable record of speaking truth to power. I view it as an ally in the castigation of governments that jail, torture and kill citizens out of ideology or a lust for power and profit. But when British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week catalogued the sordid record of human rights abuses by Iraq's regime, Amnesty responded not with applause but with a temper tantrum. Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, did not deny the accuracy of the list of genocidal campaigns, poison gas use and systematic rape and torture of dissidents. She could not. Much of it came from Amnesty's own reporting. Instead, she attacked Straw for a "cold and calculated manipulation" of the work of human rights activists. By using the truth to seek public support for an impending intervention in Iraq, Straw had done something immoral, Khan suggested. Focusing now on Jack Straw instead of Saddam Hussein is, to be polite, misguided. But this jerking of the anti-imperial knee is also representative of larger problems that liberals and even many moderates are having in finding their way amid the changes in politics, practicalities and philosophy being brought by an era of heightened societal vulnerability and security needs. They are against war -- who isn't? -- but unable to describe convincingly practical solutions or the values that they uniquely represent. If not quite the dawn of creation, this is a time of significant adjustments in the daily lives and pocketbooks of all Americans. Our courts, bureaucracies and rules of war are being reshaped without clear answers to the practical questions of how permanent, how effective or how costly change will be. It is vital for the voice of liberals and moderates who did not vote for George W. Bush to be heard and to have enough weight nationally and internationally to be taken into account. Every government needs to be constrained, to be forced to place limits on its impulses and actions. Politics is the art of the balance wheel. This will require new thinking on the left, which seems mired in nostalgia for the eras when colonialism, apartheid and Cold War excess were obvious sources of global evil and easy targets. We must all continue to focus on human rights abuses by governments. But not at the price of ignoring or minimizing the threat of nihilism carried out by bands of fanatics who believe in and are capable of practicing what Albert Camus called "violence without limits." The words of Camus come to mind from reading accounts of a wide-ranging and fortuitous reexamination of his work at the Pompidou Center in Paris last weekend. The French author is a useful guide for the thinking left in this time of terror, even though he was made a Nobel literature laureate 45 years ago next week and will have been dead 43 years next month. In his native Algeria, Camus saw the effects both of politically inspired terrorism and government repression and overreaction. He developed a philosophy out of activism and morality to counter the logic of violence and absolutism, which then as now were intimately related. He shocked his progressive hosts in Stockholm in 1957 by first denouncing racist repression and then emotionally adding: "I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which someday could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice." Camus believed at least two big things relevant to our present dilemma: Moral limits must be imposed on violence, which is nonetheless justifiable in certain circumstances. Camus was no pacifist. In a time of unspeakable violence, he found a balance in the human condition between hope and despair. He spoke from the left about the need for action tempered by thought and humanism. It is a message that liberal politicians and organizations will continue to ignore at their peril.