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

To: FaultLine who wrote (75113)	2/18/2003 4:38:41 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

*Listen To the Doubters* By E. J. Dionne Jr. Columnist The Washington Post Tuesday, February 18, 2003 I have a terrible foreboding that when we look back on our debate over the impending war with Iraq, we will be disappointed in ourselves. We may end up starting a war without any real argument over what it will take to win the peace. Like many Americans, I do not feel fully comfortable in either of the big camps lined up against each other over this war. Those of us who are doubters but not full-fledged opponents constitute, by a fair reading of the polls, about one-third of our fellow citizens. We doubters cannot identify with those who see American power as a force for evil in the world, and we believe President Bush was right to increase pressure on Saddam Hussein to disarm. Many of us agree with British Prime Minister Tony Blair's statement over the weekend that, given the nature of the Iraqi regime, "ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity." But doubters do not share the confidence of so many of the war's supporters that victory will revolutionize the politics of the Middle East. We worry about the unintended consequences of military action and can't quite shake the hope that the very military buildup Bush has carried out creates opportunities to disarm and perhaps even unseat Hussein through means short of war. My own doubts are rooted in the Bush administration's failure to prepare our country for the long commitment that will be required if this war is to achieve the results its supporters promise. We still don't know how the administration intends to handle the aftermath of what one hopes would be an American military victory. And it is not as obvious to me as it is to the war's supporters that this battle is the clear next step in our response to 9/11. It's hard to escape the feeling that those who always wanted to "finish" the last Gulf war by getting rid of Hussein are using the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as a rationale for doing what they wanted to do on Sept. 10. Some of my doubts are, purely and simply, doubts about this administration. I find it astonishing that Bush and his lieutenants are not willing to offer a sober calculation of the long-term costs of this war, factor those costs into the nation's budget and ask Americans to pay the price. Instead, they would shuck off the costs to the next generation. Their failure to count the costs can only make you wonder about how committed they are to what will be an arduous struggle to pacify and democratize Iraq. This is why it matters that we have allies, including, eventually, those obstreperous French and Germans. We are unlikely to want to do the job of rebuilding Iraq all by ourselves, or with the British alone. God bless the Czechs and the Poles, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Estonians and other Europeans standing with us. But it is unrealistic to think that these nations will be in a position to offer serious help, financial or military, in the postwar work of transforming Iraq. It's easy to trash the French and the Germans. But the leaders of Germany and France are only following European public opinion. Even if you think that Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder are being opportunistic, you wonder how much the Bush administration created the opportunity they are exploiting by conditioning public opinion against us. Would we be in this fix -- would millions of demonstrators have poured into European streets -- if the Bush administration had not been so publicly indifferent to European views on issues ranging from global warming to the International Criminal Court? Yet like so many of my fellow doubters, I find it hard to be a wholehearted supporter of the antiwar movement. Some in its ranks harbor reflexive anti-Israel sentiments that I find repellent, even though I am no supporter of Ariel Sharon. For all my misgivings about Bush, I find it absurd to call him a greater threat than Hussein, as some in the antiwar movement do. By being a man of few doubts, Bush pushed a reluctant world into dealing with the dangers posed by Hussein. But that is an achievement Bush now threatens to undercut by being indifferent or dismissive toward those who lack his certainty. The danger is that he will fail to build the consensus, at home and abroad, to turn an American military victory into a genuine triumph for our national security and for democracy. More than he knows, he needs the doubters. © 2003 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com

To: FaultLine who wrote (75113)	2/18/2003 11:35:47 AM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

I'm moderately bemused that French bashing has for the moment surpassed the long running Arab / Muslim bashing theme here. So they disagree with W's war plans. That makes them our eternal enemies now? They got there interests, we have ours. I guess the locally preferred alternative would be "such overt obsequiousness" as documented in upi.com , but I have a feeling there's a limit to how much of that the US can afford to buy right now. Rummy's "new Europe" was probably expensive enough.