Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (67991)	1/23/2003 11:37:14 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's Worldwide Audience By Jim Hoagland Columnist The Washington Post Thursday, January 23, 2003 The growing sense that President Bush must soon make a formal decision on war with Iraq has touched off a frenzy of diplomatic maneuvering around the world. You risk a bad case of whiplash by trying to follow each day's twists and turns. Stay focused on three fixed points: • Diplomats no less than spies are trained to throw dust in the eyes of their nation's adversaries while pretending to be helpful. They also make an art form of masking the power politics and personal ambitions that help drive even high-minded foreign policies. Bush and his team are accused of playing politics with foreign policy. They do. But they in no way have a monopoly on that practice. • Saddam Hussein has chosen a political strategy, and not a disarmament strategy, in response to the sword the United States holds above his head. He set out to show that the American threshold for using force to disarm Iraq is different, and less legitimate, than that of Europe, Russia and China. He is close to achieving that goal; but it could be a Pyrrhic victory for the Iraqi dictator. • Proxies are of limited value in forming a view on the decisive question: Is Iraq a serious enough threat to justify an American-led assault? Demonstrations, both pro and anti, are staged to raise funds, get television time and advance careers as well as influence opinion. A charismatic secretary of state who seemed to doves a few months ago to champion their case of nonintervention can don hawk's feathers overnight, as Colin Powell has. Do your own homework on Iraq, its dictator and history. Ten weeks ago President Bush and Powell wrung a unanimous vote from the Security Council for tougher U.N. inspections in Iraq. They said they wanted to give diplomacy a chance to show that Iraq could be disarmed peacefully, while keeping open a military option. They appeared to be in the driver's seat of diplomacy. Since then public opinion in Europe and Asia's key countries has mounted against the military option -- even though Iraq has offered no convincing proof that it has given up its weapons of mass destruction, as required by the U.N. resolution. To regain the initiative, Bush and Powell must now cut through the diplomatic complexities created by their own Security Council victory and by the passage of time. A trip to Paris and Brussels this month brought home to me the obvious public opinion problems that the looming war creates for European politicians. But the journey also spotlighted a political development that is difficult to see from Washington, even though it affects the current diplomatic maneuvering: The power equation in Europe has shifted dramatically since November. A collapse in political and economic confidence in Germany has immobilized its coalition government, now beset by increasingly open clashes between Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. In Britain, Tony Blair has to devote time and energy to quelling unease in his Cabinet and his own party over Iraq and a plethora of domestic problems. France has recently emerged as the clear center of power and initiative in Europe, making President Jacques Chirac's government more assertive on many issues, including questioning Bush's Iraq policy. Moreover, Chirac's energetic foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, is a man with a political future and ambitions that stretch far beyond the events of next week, when U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix will report to the Security Council and Bush will deliver his State of the Union address. De Villepin's willingness to challenge Powell at the United Nations on Monday did not go unnoticed in France. Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, faithfully translates Blair's determination to be a "proud interventionist" against murderous regimes such as the one in Iraq. But Straw can never forget that more than 30 percent of the residents of his home district are Muslim. It is no wonder he sounded relieved earlier this month when, after talking to Powell, he announced that the odds against war had moved up to 60 percent. After talking to Blair -- who talks to Bush rather than to Powell -- Straw went back to sounding hawkish warnings that time was running out for Iraq. While steadfastly assembling the military might to disarm Iraq, the Bush administration has been much less successful in helping -- or pressuring -- friendly leaders abroad to explain to their own nations why Washington must act now to prevent Iraq from once more slipping out of its clear obligations to disarm. Bush's Jan. 28 speech to the nation must also be a speech to the world. Time is running out for Washington as well. © 2003 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (67991)	1/23/2003 11:57:54 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 281500

Mondo Washington by James Ridgeway January 22 - 28, 2003 Testosterone Floods the Senate Floor Merit Badges for Murder? Heroine of the Week Testosterone Floods the Senate Floor Kiss My Axis! WASHINGTON—As the war on Iraq got down to business last week with the heaviest air bombardments in 10 years, the Bush administration's dillydallying over North Korea made diplomatic resolution of that crisis increasingly difficult. The more shuffling by Bush, the wider the opening for war hawks here and in Pyongyang to turn diplomatic misunderstandings into a fighting war. Last week four Senate hawks introduced legislation to get tough with North Korea. One of them, John McCain, wants to formally confront North Korea with the threat of a preemptive strike. There's no question but that North Korea is a dangerous place that broke its nuclear agreements, threw out the UN inspectors, and openly threatens to bury the Korean peninsula in a bloodbath. But it is also true that the U.S. has not kept its side of the bargain struck during the Clinton administration in 1994. That agreement called for the U.S. to help North Korea with fuel and to build two nuclear power plants. In addition, the U.S. agreed to accept the existence of North Korea and agreed not to attack it. To date, the power plants have not even been begun, and rather than recognize North Korea's existence, the Bush national security doctrine threatens preemptive strikes against rogue states in the axis of evil, including North Korea. As Selig Harrison, the Korean expert at the Center for International Policy in Washington, reports, when U.S. negotiator James Kelly met with North Korea's first deputy foreign minister, Kang Sok Ju, on October 4, the North Koreans offered to halt development of weapons-grade plutonium if the U.S. would drop its policy of preemptive strikes. But in the current circumstances such a step would represent a tremendous loss of credibility for Bush and as a practical matter seems impossible. Last September, Bush promulgated his national security doctrine, which explicitly singled out North Korea as a dangerous rogue state "developing its own WMD arsenal" and went on to set forth Dick Cheney's pet preemptive strike doctrine: "Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents. . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively." Last week three conservative Republican senators—Arizona's Jon Kyl and John McCain and Alabama's Jeff Sessions—joined with Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh in sponsoring legislation to reinstitute sanctions against North Korea and require congressional approval for any nuclear cooperation agreement. As Kyl put it, "North Korea must feel some pressure to begin to dismantle its nuclear programs." And McCain, the most vociferous hawk on Capitol Hill, wrote in The Weekly Standard, "America's challenge in Asia is to compel North Korea's nuclear disarmament. . . . If we fail to achieve the international cooperation necessary to end this threat, then the countries in the region should know with certainty that while they may risk their own populations, the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Congressional hawks are joined by hard-liners in the Bush administration, including Cheney's national security point man, Lewis "Scooter" Libby (a protégé of Nixon's lawyer Leonard Garment and a longtime lawyer for fugitive financier Marc Rich), along with Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who is chief arms control negotiator. It's "an evil regime," Bolton has said of North Korea. As the hawks become more strident, there are bound to be questions of a coup. To date, Kim Jong Il has dexterously maneuvered his way amid various factions by placing family members in key army posts, and then moving his own power base away from the ruling Workers Party to the military, which official North Korean organs have been celebrating recently as a "perfect mode of politics" because "our revolutionary philosophy is that the Army is precisely the Party, people, and state." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------