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

To: JohnM who wrote (65975)	1/14/2003 1:45:49 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

We were discussing what people liked about Bush, that is what it has to do with the "price of bread". Since I have read plenty of pieces that do not take a shot at Clinton, I have no idea what you are going on about. I cannot explain what is false........

To: JohnM who wrote (65975)	1/14/2003 1:49:43 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Powell and Bush at Cross-Purposes? By Charles Krauthammer Friday, January 10, 2003; Page A21 The single most remarkable passage in Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" has, to my knowledge, gone unremarked. In early August 2002, Colin Powell decides that the Iraq hawks have gotten to the president, and that he has not weighed in enough to restrain them. He feels remorse: "During the Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly [emphasis added], that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political." Now, it is well known that Powell had been against the Gulf War and for "containment." What was not known was that, if Woodward is to be believed, Powell to this day still believes that sanctions were the right course and that he should have pushed harder for them. This is astonishing. After a decade of bitter experience we know that sanctions are utterly useless in dealing with Saddam Hussein. If he did not give up his weapons programs in response to the most stringent sanctions imposed after defeat and humiliation in war, imagine how little effect sanctions would have had if he had been left in control not just of Kuwait and all its oil but of all his military assets as well. Advocating the sanctions Band-Aid 12 years ago can be forgiven. But after what we have learned since then, how can one still think that would have been the better policy? Even Richard Gephardt admits that in retrospect the Democrats' (and Powell's) advocacy of sanctions was wrong. Sanctions would have left Kuwait under Hussein and left Hussein in possession of a nuclear program that was just months away from success. Only the Gulf War prevented Iraq from becoming a nuclear power. Powell regrets not having prevented the war that prevented that outcome? This places Powell's actions in the current Iraq crisis in a new light. In August 2002 he persuaded the president to go to the United Nations. The pitfalls of such a course were obvious. International support is lovely, but key members of the Security Council have long undermined any serious effort to disarm Hussein and have publicly opposed the president's policy of regime change. Did Powell go to the United Nations to garner support for the president's policy? Or did he go to undermine that policy and implement instead the preferred Powell policy of "containment" -- leaving Hussein in place -- by setting up an endless inspection process that keeps America at bay? Which is it? We don't know. But if it was Powell's intention to advance policy rather than thwart Bush's policy, then it is incumbent upon him to help the president out of the U.N. inspections box Powell created. It is impossible to find weapons of mass destruction in an uncooperative country. Even strong, determined inspectors will fail. Look: The United States was attacked with anthrax -- and more than a year later we still can't find the stuff, even with the cooperation of the entire national government and every law enforcement agency in sight. How do you expect to find anthrax in a country in which the authorities are hiding it? Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix is neither strong nor determined. He was handpicked by France and Russia in 2000 for precisely that reason. (When it was suggested to an administration official that Blix was Inspector Clouseau, he protested that this was unfair: "Clouseau was trying to find stuff.") Everyone knows that the only way to find weapons is to question Iraqi scientists under conditions of protective asylum outside Iraq. Yet Blix has contemptuously dismissed this option as running "an abduction agency." Instead, he is running a farce. President Bush has been outspoken in expressing skepticism about the inspection process. But the president should not be out front taking the public relations hit for being openly skeptical. This is the job of the secretary of state. It is the job of the man who set up the Blix inspection game in the first place. On Jan. 27 Blix will present his findings to the Security Council. They will be equivocal. He already told the Security Council yesterday that he found no smoking gun. (Surprise!) Blix's report will call for endless more inspections and will be seized upon by defenders of the status quo on the Security Council to deny the legitimacy of American military action. It will then be Powell's duty to discount the Blix charade -- to point out, for example, that Blix has not taken a single Iraqi scientist out of the country for interrogation free from Iraqi coercion -- and to explain why America cannot be deterred by it. Or is charade Powell's intention, the way to vindicate his misgivings about Gulf War I and to ensure that Saddam Hussein's regime remains merely contained -- and intact? washingtonpost.com Well, no gratuitous slam at Clinton there.

To: JohnM who wrote (65975)	1/14/2003 1:52:14 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Japan Card By Charles Krauthammer Friday, January 3, 2003; Page A19 When the secretary of state goes on five Sunday morning talk shows to deny that something is a crisis, it is a crisis. The administration has been playing down the gravity of North Korea's nuclear breakout, and for good reason. For now, there is little the administration can do. No point, therefore, in advertising our helplessness. But there is no overestimating the seriousness of the problem. If we did not have so many of our military assets tied up in the Persian Gulf, we would today have carriers off the coast of Korea and be mobilizing reinforcements for our garrison there. North Korea is about to go from a rogue state that may have one or two nuclear bombs hidden somewhere to one that is in the nuclear manufacturing business. And North Korea sells everything it gets its hands on. This is serious stuff. And the clock is ticking. We have no idea how far along the North Koreans are on their uranium enrichment program. But we know that when they fire up their plutonium reprocessing plant, they will be months away from creating a real nuclear arsenal. The problem is that we have few cards to play. Militarily we are not even in position to bluff. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was duty-bound to affirm America's capacity to fight two wars at once. Unfortunately, that capacity went by the boards at least a decade ago, and the North Koreans know it. It is precisely because they know it that they are using this window of opportunity, this moment of Iraqi distraction, to brazenly go nuclear. Moreover, even if we were not preoccupied in Iraq, we might find ourselves self-deterred from doing anything militarily against North Korea. Yes, we could bomb the nuclear processing plant in Yongbyon. Problem is, that would not destroy Pyongyang's entire capacity for producing nuclear weapons, the way the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor destroyed Iraq's. And given North Korea's propensity for using special operations, infiltration and sleeper agents (techniques it has used with success against South Korea), we have to imagine that it might retaliate with a smuggled nuclear weapon against American facilities or perhaps even against the American homeland. It might be suicidal. It is improbable. It is not impossible. That alone might deter us from a preemptive attack on Yongbyon. But even if nukes were not a consideration, we would be deterred by North Korea's conventional military capacity. Unlike Iraq, it has a serious army, a million strong and possessing thousands of artillery tubes, many hidden in caves, many that can reach -- and reduce -- Seoul. In other words, North Korea may already have passed the threshold to invulnerability from American attack. So, the administration has chosen a strategy of economic and diplomatic isolation. The idea is to squeeze the North Korean regime to the point where it can no longer function. That could be done. China supplies nearly all of North Korea's energy and 40 percent of its foodstuffs. South Korea has significant investments in North Korea. International organizations provide a huge amount of food aid. Moreover, North Korea has only a few major harbors. They could be blockaded. If China and South Korea were to cut off North Korea, it could not survive. The problem with this scenario is that South Korea and China do not want to play ball. They fear the chaos that might ensue. The American containment strategy was already falling apart on Day One, when both the South Korean president and the president-elect criticized it. The Chinese have been even more recalcitrant. They show no inclination to deny North Korea what it needs to survive. Even more ominously, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports that the Chinese have just shipped 20 tons of highly specialized chemicals used in extracting plutonium from spent reactor fuel. What to do when your hand is so poor? Play the trump. We do have one, but we dare not speak its name: a nuclear Japan. Japan cannot long tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea. Having once lobbed a missile over Japan, North Korea could easily hit any city in Japan with a nuclear-tipped weapon. Japan does not want to live under that threat. We should go to the Chinese and tell them plainly that if they do not join us in squeezing North Korea and thus stopping its march to go nuclear, we will endorse any Japanese attempt to create a nuclear deterrent of its own. Even better, we would sympathetically regard any request by Japan to acquire American nuclear missiles as an immediate and interim deterrent. If our nightmare is a nuclear North Korea, China's is a nuclear Japan. It's time to share the nightmares. washingtonpost.com Nope, no Clinton bashing there. Hmmmmm.......

To: JohnM who wrote (65975)	1/14/2003 6:06:19 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You must be related. If you don't recognize shrill in K's columns, then we've got the radio tuned to different channels. He's less shrill, these days, than George Will and Michael Kelly. Granted. But shrill he is. How about this distinction? If "shrill" is ascribing virtue and good motives to my side, and vice and bad motives to your side, then Krauthammer, unlike Coulter and quite a few others, is almost never shrill. But he is routinely arrogant, in the sense of "my opponents are dunderheaded, fuzz-brained naifs, and only I see the situation for what it is".