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

To: PartyTime who wrote (68717)	1/25/2003 10:07:26 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

War Is No Superbowl By Robert Scheer Syndicated Columnist January 10, 2003 As an unabashed, nail-biting Oakland Raiders fanatic who sits in the nose-bleed seats and who just bought my grandson pajamas and a dishware set emblazoned with the team's infamous pirate logo, I still must admit that there is something unsettling about this year's whirlwind of playoff and bowl games. Isn't there something perverse about a nation completely engrossed in football while the drumbeats of war, a deadlier game, beat persistently yet quietly in the background? While the symbols of patriotism are everywhere – from the ubiquitous military recruitment ads to the stars and stripes affixed to referee uniforms at the Orange Bowl – television news anchors chirp about the latest troop movements and "incidents" in the "no-fly" zone. And for many Americans huddled around the tube in midwinter, knocking off Saddam Hussein is an easy sell, offering as it does a cheap thrill demanding less sacrifice than that needed to acquire playoff tickets – and less angst over the outcome. However, the viewing public doesn't seem to understand that what is being planned by our president is not Gulf War II – a swift punch in the mouth to our old ally Hussein – but rather a multiyear occupation by the U.S. of an independent, powerful and modern Muslim nation rife with ethnic tension. If people think the invasion of Iraq is something that can fit neatly in the slot between the Super Bowl and spring training, they ought to read Monday's New York Times report that the "final plans for administering and democratizing Iraq... amount to the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II." The Times' Sunday magazine cover story was even more explicit: "The American Empire: Get Used to It," challenged the headline. History tells us that wars of empire are wars without end, as nationalism is a force that never can be truly suppressed – just ask the relatives of those killed in the latest suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv how well Palestinian dreams of statehood are being managed. Is the U.S. ready to be fully responsible for the future of Iraq's stateless Kurds and its repressed Shiite population? Some U.S.-based corporations will make out like bandits in a post-occupation Iraq, as a Western power again attempts to bring enlightenment to the region while ripping off its oil. However, U.S. taxpayers and soldiers and, most of all, Iraqi women and children will ultimately suffer the consequences. It seems clear that if Americans were to devote the same seriousness of thought to the consequences of invading Iraq that they have to evaluating the pros and cons of the controversial computerized ranking system of college football teams, we would not be on the road to "preemptive" war on the other side of the world. Sports – stats, video replay, expert commentators – are discussed with a blend of logic and fact that we don't get but should demand in discussions about Iraq. But the war debaters on talk radio and cable news shows manage to meld the mindless partisanship of fans with constant obfuscation, macho posturing and a rattling of credentials all designed to intimidate war skeptics. Meanwhile, like a character in Alice's Wonderland, the president insists facts that challenge the administration's position don't matter. That U.N. inspectors have found nothing alarming during uninhibited visits to more than 200 suspected Iraqi weapons sites is simply spun by the White House as another example of Iraq lying. Never mind that polls show the majority of Americans want proof Iraq has weapons that actually threaten us before they will support war. Once the troops land, patriotism will trump our common sense. With no draft and a completely dominant military, most Americans have come to view war as something akin to the dark twin of the Olympics: an international test of strength accompanied by big opening-night fireworks over the host city. Despite the rampant use of war metaphors in sports, however, war is no game. The whistles are not blown in time, there are no penalties for unnecessary roughness and those risking their lives are never paid the big bucks. Unfortunately, for those of us sitting safely in the good seats, it can be a heck of a show – just like the Roman circus. alternet.org

To: PartyTime who wrote (68717)	1/25/2003 10:15:06 AM
From: William B. Kohn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

And you know for fact certain, that the tubes the inspectors looked at were indeed the exact tubes imported to Iraq? You know for fact certain, that the US administration is lying and that Saddam is telling the truth? Given the past history of the Iraqi regime, you are really stretching the reality. bill

To: PartyTime who wrote (68717)	1/25/2003 10:16:17 AM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 281500

Staring down France, Germany, Clinton By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY Jan. 24, 2003, 6:52PM chron.com THE United States faces a military challenge abroad without the backing of France, Germany and Clinton. [Former President] Clinton's speech on Thursday was devoted mostly to disparaging the Bush tax-reform proposal. In doing so he used a quaint device: Tax reform would amount, he said with mock-serious facial concern, "to sending more money to me." That was his way of saying that he is now rich, which indeed he is, having been paid in the past year $9 million in speaking fees. In one of those speeches, in Raleigh, N.C., on Dec. 11, 2002, he said, "I hope the Democrats will support the position the administration now has in Iraq, which I think is the correct one." The administration's position hasn't changed in the last six weeks. What has happened is the effective disengagement of France and Germany from the foreign policy of the senior partner of the NATO alliance. European opposition to the Bush policy on Iraq has energized an opposition and given Clinton a vision of a golden harvest for the Democratic Party in which his wife looms as a central figure. There are those who wonder that someone who served so recently as commander in chief would choose a moment on the probable eve of a military engagement in which American lives are exposed to disparage the entire operation in which they are engaged. The dispatch in The New York Times by correspondent David E. Sanger is worth study. It is headlined, "To Some in Europe, the Major Problem Is Bush the Cowboy." An unnamed U.S. diplomat reports that he hears complaints "all the time." "Much of it is the way he talks, the rhetoric, the religiosity," the diplomat reports. "It reminds them of what drove them crazy about Reagan. It reminds them of what they miss about Clinton. All the stereotypes we thought we had banished for good after Sept. 11 -- the cowboy imagery, in particular -- it's all back." What is it -- one gives intensive thought to the question -- that the estranged French and Germans found so offensive in Reagan? One thinks back ... Rea-gan said early on in his administration that communism was headed for the ash heap of history, where it belonged. This astonished a professional diplomatic community that lives and breathes off ambiguity. Not much later, President Reagan said that we were dealing with an "evil empire." This caused true commotion: Chiefs of state were not expected to use language that issued from moral formulations, what some people no doubt thought of as "religiosity." And then Reagan, speaking in Berlin, pointed up to the stone masonry with its turrets and machine guns and man- hunting dogs that for 25 years had kept immured Germans who longed for freedom. Reagan addressed the leader of the Soviet Union by saying: "Tear down that wall." The dissenting Europeans were early on put off by President Bush, we learn from the dispatch in The Times, because he had said shortly after taking office that the Kyoto treaty was "dead." The language was probably unwise, but Bush's decisiveness was in wholesome contrast to Clinton's evasions. He signed the Kyoto treaty but never submitted it to the Senate, knowing that there -- excuse the language -- it would be "dead." Bush went on to reject U.S. submission to an International Criminal Court. His doing so projected a developing awareness of the underside of the cooperative, internationalist mystique. Such involvements contend with developments like a U.N. Human Rights Commission that will be headed up by Libya. A confrontation on the point of collective action is now directly ahead, and some have warned of it for years. The senior Bush insisted in 1990 that the United Nations had to endorse the Persian Gulf War, which was done. But now the junior Bush is up against a de facto mutiny from the creeping superordination of the United Nations over U.S. policy. President Bush will either ignore the call to go to the United Nations to authorize military action, or he will go to the United Nations and live with a French veto. Outlive a French veto? If Bush has correctly analyzed the best interests of the United States, he will proceed to take action to remove Saddam Hussein. That is how such cowboys as Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan would have acted, unafraid, in doing so, to invoke the blessing Abraham Lincoln invoked in his mission, about which there was a very great division.