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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (13447)	2/25/2003 2:43:21 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

The latest from Princeton's Paul Krugman... Threats, Promises and Lies By PAUL KRUGMAN OP-ED COLUMNIST The New York Times February 25, 2003 So it seems that Turkey wasn't really haggling about the price, it just wouldn't accept payment by check or credit card. In return for support of an Iraq invasion, Turkey wanted — and got — immediate aid, cash on the barrelhead, rather than mere assurances about future help. You'd almost think President Bush had a credibility problem. And he does. The funny thing is that this administration sets great store by credibility. As the justifications for invading Iraq come and go — Saddam is developing nuclear weapons; no, but he's in league with Osama; no, but he's really evil — the case for war has come increasingly to rest on credibility. You see, say the hawks, we've already put our soldiers in position, so we must attack or the world won't take us seriously. But credibility isn't just about punishing people who cross you. It's also about honoring promises, and telling the truth. And those are areas where the Bush administration has problems. Consider the astonishing fact that Vicente Fox, president of Mexico, appears unwilling to cast his U.N. Security Council vote in America's favor. Given Mexico's close economic ties to the United States, and Mr. Fox's onetime personal relationship with Mr. Bush, Mexico should have been more or less automatically in America's column. But the Mexican president feels betrayed. He took the politically risky step of aligning himself closely with Mr. Bush — a boost to Republican efforts to woo Hispanic voters — in return for promised reforms that would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants. The administration never acted on those reforms, and Mr. Fox is in no mood to do Mr. Bush any more favors. Mr. Fox is not alone. In fact, I can't think of anyone other than the hard right and corporate lobbyists who has done a deal with Mr. Bush and not come away feeling betrayed. New York's elected representatives stood side by side with him a few days after Sept. 11 in return for a promise of generous aid. A few months later, as they started to question the administration's commitment, the budget director, Mitch Daniels, accused them of "money-grubbing games." Firefighters and policemen applauded Mr. Bush's promise, more than a year ago, of $3.5 billion for "first responders"; so far, not a penny has been delivered. These days, whenever Mr. Bush makes a promise — like his new program to fight AIDS in Africa — experienced Bushologists ask, "O.K., that's the bait, where's the switch?" (Answer: Much of the money will be diverted from other aid programs, such as malaria control.) Then there's the honesty thing. Mr. Bush's mendacity on economic matters was obvious even during the 2000 election. But lately it has reached almost pathological levels. Last week Mr. Bush — who has been having a hard time getting reputable economists to endorse his economic plan — claimed an endorsement from the latest Blue Chip survey of business economists. "I don't know what he was citing," declared the puzzled author of that report, which said no such thing. What Americans may not fully appreciate is the extent to which similarly unfounded claims have, in the eyes of much of the world, discredited the administration's foreign policy. Whatever the real merits of the case against Iraq, again and again the administration has cited evidence that turns out to be misleading or worthless — "garbage after garbage after garbage," according to one U.N. official. Despite his decline in the polls, Mr. Bush hasn't fully exhausted his reservoir of trust in this country. People still remember the stirring image of the president standing amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, his arm around a fireman's shoulders — and our ever-deferential, protective media haven't said much about the broken promises that followed. But the rest of the world simply doesn't trust Mr. Bush either to honor his promises or to tell the truth. Can we run a foreign policy in the absence of trust? The administration apparently thinks it can use threats as a substitute. Officials have said that they expect undecided Security Council members to come around out of fear of being on the "wrong" side. And Mr. Bush may yet get the U.N. to acquiesce, grudgingly, in his war. But even if he does, we shouldn't delude ourselves: whatever credibility we may gain by invading Iraq is small recompense for the trust we have lost around the world. nytimes.com

To: tekboy who wrote (13447)	2/25/2003 3:38:17 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

A Tip on Iraq From Those Who Walked That Road The French paid dearly for imperial and military hubris. Listen up, U.S. By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times February 25, 2003 The alliances on "Survivor" have more stability and logic than those currently held by the United States. We need a weekly two-hour special to keep us in the know. Did we buy off Turkey yet? Hey, what's $15 billion for a mercenary in need? And is Syria, the sworn enemy of our enemy, Saddam Hussein, our new friend? Oh, and if Pakistan is the dictatorship that backed the Taliban, why are we covering our ears and humming the theme to "Friends" whenever anyone talks about its nukes and scary collaboration with North Korea? We suddenly like those U.S. flag-burners in Tehran -- possessors of a nuclear weapons program Hussein can only dream of -- so much that we have given their boys in the Northern Alliance the keys to Kabul, and now we might open the back door for them to take over Shiite southern Iraq. On the other hand, old ally Germany and new ally Russia have both been downgraded to a status below lap dog Bulgaria for daring to suggest that Emperor Bush is without clothes; while uppity China is getting a reprieve because, as our second-largest trading partner, it keeps Wal-Mart stocked with patriotic animatronic toys. If we weren't worried about burning the waffles, we'd probably have lobbed a few cruise missiles into antiwar Belgium by now. Nutty Pyongyang is receiving a mix of strained patience and physical restraints, while we apparently think another round of electroshock therapy is the cure for troubled Iraq. And while we like Iraq's Kurds and Shiites now, they'd best be advised to cash in before the next immunity challenge, when they could be on the short end of the stick of whatever malleable Iraqi general we handpick to run our new oil fields. Is all this shuffling of friends and foes just realpolitik, similar to how we ignore the mayhem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an inconvenient sideshow? Like when President Reagan was cutting secret arms deals with Tehran's fundamentalists, even as he sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1984 to reaffirm our support for Iraq after the U.N. documented its use of poison gas on Iranian troops? Despite this confusing picture then and now, thanks to our enlightened talk-show hosts we all know that there is one nation of pure evil, one nasty country threatening to undermine the world's security with its lies, double-dealing and stubborn defiance, one state that Earth would simply be better off without. We're talking, of course, about France. Brie eaters. Surly waiters. WWII collaborators. And now, cowardly traitors in the crusade against the New Hitler. This idiocy is based on a highly selective historical memory, including the fact that the U.S. refused to enter the war against Hitler until after France fell. It also keeps us from being able to listen to a nation that has already been down the road we are traveling. Imperialism has always been pitched at home as a win-win way to help the world's stricken peoples while helping oneself, and in Paris it was no different. France's colonial wars were waged under the rival banners of Catholicism and the French Revolution; the goal was to civilize the natives. A million Frenchmen gave up the joys of life at the center of Europe to colonize Algeria alone, building schools, churches, hospitals and civic bureaucracies. Ultimately, however, the price of France's hubris was writ large in the blood of its sons and daughters over painful decades, from the fall of Dien Bien Phu to the Battle of Algiers, from the student protests of '68 to the bombs that terrorized Paris. One of the fallen was a French soldier-cum-journalist named Bernard Fall. He died when he stepped on a Viet Cong land mine while accompanying a U.S. patrol, but not before he had written compellingly about the inevitable stench of imperial ambition turning rancid. But let's let Colin Powell explain. "I recently read Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, 'Street Without Joy,' " the secretary of State and Vietnam vet wrote in his 1995 autobiography. "Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam." Many believe that the U.S. is simply incapable of imperialism or even of being wrong, that we are the divinely designated agent of democracy, that gleaming City on the Hill so frequently mentioned by Reagan. But the lesson of France is that merely riding in under the banner of liberty is no guarantee that you or those you "liberate" won't regret you ever left home. latimes.com

To: tekboy who wrote (13447)	2/26/2003 3:17:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Watching the war with both eyes By James Carroll Columnist The Boston Globe 2/25/2003 BECAUSE THE CIRCLE of chaos was closing in on the realm, the hero went to the troll and, forcibly subduing him, demanded to know the secret of drawing order out of chaos. The troll replied, ''Give me your left eye and I'll tell you.'' Because the hero loved his threatened people so much, he did not hesitate. He gouged out his own left eye and gave it to the troll, who then said, ''The secret of order over chaos is: Watch with both eyes.'' This story, from the late novelist John Gardner, perfectly illustrates the American problem. We are embarking on war with only one eye watching. That eye sees Iraq, Saddam Hussein, the threat of terrorism, a break with ''old Europe,'' the frightening foreground of the post 9/11 world. What we are not seeing is the larger background where far more deadly dangers lurk. We have no eye on the very real possibility that this swaggering war, coupled with the ''us-or-them'' spirit of US foreign policy, will force Russia and China back into the armed hostility of a bygone era. A restoration of that enmity will return both powers, independently or together, to the bunker of rampant nuclear threat - the only way to check Washington's unipolar and unilateral exercise of power. Ironically, that the world survived the nuclear terror of the Cold War seems to have made the American people assume that no such threat can ever reappear, which is the only reason the far lesser dangers of Saddam and Al Qaeda can have so traumatized us. But superpower nuclear danger is making a comeback. It is well known that the United States, Russia, and, to a lesser degree, China maintain globe-destroying nuclear arsenals. What has not been sufficiently noted is that the nuclear powers have stopped working toward the elimination of nukes and are again depending on them as guarantors of national sway. That was clear a year ago in Washington with the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, but not only there. While Leonid Brezhnev (responding to the worldwide freeze movement) declared in 1982 that Moscow would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, Vladimir Putin (responding to NATO's 1999 air war against Serbia) renounced that promise in 2000. Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in 1986 the elimination of all nuclear weapons; Putin's ''new concept of security,'' like Bush's new ''strategic doctrine,'' assumes their permanence. And so with China. When Washington renounced the ABM Treaty last year, Beijing could reasonably assume that new US missile defense would undercut the deterrent value of China's comparatively small nuclear arsenal, forcing an escalation of offensive capacity. The militarization of China's nascent space program becomes inevitable in response to the Pentagon's resuscitated Star Wars. The arms race in orbit. What we have here - Russia bristling at US moves into Central Asia; China ever wary of US-armed Taiwan - are the preconditions of a renewed Cold War and worse. This is the background to which our missing eye makes us blind. The war in Iraq will open into all these horrors, which can rapidly spread. Russia's quickened belligerence will unsettle Eastern Europe and Germany, which, distrusting the United States, may finally pursue nukes of its own. China's escalations will spark India's, increasing pressure on Japan, at last, to embrace nuclear weapons. Already smoldering fires in North Korea and Pakistan can easily ignite. A domino theory - the falling of nuclear abstinence before mass proliferation - will be proven true after all. The new chain reaction. Watching with two eyes, we would see that in dealing with Saddam, no nation's convictions matter more than those of Russia and China. Why? Simply because they can, with us, set in motion forces to destroy the world. It is more crucial than ever, building on the near-miraculous peaceful outcome of the Cold War, to erect structures of trust and mutuality with these two former enemies. Yet the opposite is happening. If Washington were deliberately to set out to alienate Moscow and Beijing, its policy would look exactly like the Bush administration's. Americans seem hardly to have noticed that both Russia and China oppose the US plan to invade Iraq - opposition that should weigh far more than that the misgivings of France or Germany. Faced with this display of what can only appear as American imperial assault, Russia and China have good reason to feel threatened. They can be expected to hasten the construction of a counterforce aimed at limiting Washington, renewing a level of catastrophic threat that will make today's ''war on terrorism'' - and even tomorrow's war on Iraq - look like the good old days. To watch the looming US aggression with both eyes is to oppose it. ________________________________________ James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com

To: tekboy who wrote (13447)	3/3/2003 5:04:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Iraq Isn't Worth Losing U.S. Allies by Charles A. Kupchan Newsday Published on Monday, March 3, 2003 Toppling Saddam Hussein promises to do away with one of the Middle East's most aggressive regimes and to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But, in pursuing these worthy goals, the United States is putting on the line the partnerships and principles that have served as the foundation of the international system since World War II. As the tortured diplomacy of the past weeks has made clear, Washington is prepared to break with its key allies in Europe - France, Germany and Russia - and proceed with a war that much of the world does not support. In the tense days that lie ahead, America needs to weigh carefully whether the gains that will accompany the downfall of Saddam Hussein are worth the demise of the Atlantic Alliance and America's increasing isolation in global affairs. Since the early days of the Cold War, a coherent and cohesive West has been the anchor of international stability. But the West is now in the midst of coming apart, with America and Europe parting company on first-order principles - questions of war and peace. In the wake of the Cold War's end, some trans-Atlantic tension is unavoidable. The absence of the Soviet threat makes the need for Atlantic unity less immediate. And the European Union is coming of age and becoming more self-confident, making its members less willing to follow America's lead. The principal source of the West's erosion, however, is America's belligerent and unilateralist behavior. From the outset of his presidency, George W. Bush has backed away from one international agreement after another - the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the International Criminal Court and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, to name a few. He has asserted that America will embrace a doctrine of pre-emption and pre-eminence, relying on its military superiority to strike potential adversaries as Washington sees fit. And Bush made clear in his last State of the Union address that America is anything but a team player, insisting that "the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others." This swagger is more than a matter of style. It arises from the conviction, widely held among Bush's advisers, that the more powerful the United States is - and the more blustery its leadership - the more the rest of the world will get in line. But exactly the opposite is happening. Countries around the world are distancing themselves from the United States and locking arms to resist a wayward America. Most members of the European Union are doing their best to block Washington's rush to war, fully aware that doing so will invoke Washington's wrath. Even in countries such as Britain and Spain, whose governments have been siding with the Bush administration's stance on Iraq, public opinion is decidedly against war. North Korea is threatening to restart its nuclear weapons program as it seeks a deterrent against a U.S. attack. South Korea has been none too pleased with Washington's bellicose response, with Seoul taking its own approach to the crisis. Anti-American sentiment is on the rise in just about every quarter of the globe - including in countries that have for decades been close allies. In the run-up to Germany's election last September, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's party was lagging in the polls. He then played the anti- American card, denouncing Washington's intended war on Iraq - and won re-election. The new president of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, similarly gained office on a platform calling for independence from Washington. The Bush administration has thus done an impressive job of compromising America's international legitimacy and doing irreparable damage to the international order that was erected under America's watch. The impending war against Iraq may well represent the point of no return. Despite the ongoing arm-twisting, Washington appears to be far short of the votes needed to garner the Security Council's support for war. If a second resolution authorizing war is not forthcoming, the Bush administration should reverse course and defer to the strong consensus that favors putting off military action while extending the weapons inspections. At this point in the standoff, America's long-term interests will be far better served by restoring the world's confidence in U.S. leadership than by launching an attack that will be widely perceived as unnecessary and unjust. With President Bush beating the war drums on a daily basis and with 200,000 U.S. troops already massed in the Persian Gulf, it appears increasingly likely that Washington will within a matter of weeks go to war against Iraq - regardless of what transpires at the UN. American troops will probably find themselves in Baghdad in short order. If these troops do not have the backing of the international community, however, the victory will be a pyrrhic one. Without the court of world opinion on its side, the United States will cease to be a model for the world, but instead be seen as a dangerous Goliath that needs to be tamed. America will find that its long reign as the respected and trusted leader of the free world will have come to an end. That is far too high a price to pay for toppling a regime that, however loathsome, can be adequately neutralized through vigilant containment. ________________________________________________________ Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The End of the American Era." Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. commondreams.org

To: tekboy who wrote (13447)	3/6/2003 11:10:03 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Media Dodging U.N. Surveillance Story by Norman Solomon Published on Thursday, March 6, 2003 by FAIR's Media Beat commondreams.org Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers." The key word is "timely." Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council. "As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq," the London-based Observer reported on March 2, the U.S. government developed an "aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates." The smoking gun was "a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world -- and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency." The Observer added: "The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the U.N. headquarters in New York -- the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for U.N. inspections, led by France, China and Russia." The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, outlines the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council -- "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises." Three days after the memo came to light, the Times of London printed an article noting that the Bush administration "finds itself isolated" in its zeal for war on Iraq. "In the most recent setback," the newspaper reported, "a memorandum by the U.S. National Security Agency, leaked to the Observer, revealed that American spies were ordered to eavesdrop on the conversations of the six undecided countries on the United Nations Security Council." The London Times article called it an "embarrassing disclosure." And the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States. Several days after the "embarrassing disclosure," not a word about it had appeared in America's supposed paper of record. The New York Times -- the single most influential media outlet in the United States -- still had not printed anything about the story. How could that be? "Well, it's not that we haven't been interested," New York Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said Wednesday night, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. "We could get no confirmation or comment" on the memo from U.S. officials. The Times opted not to relay the Observer's account, Smale told me. "We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting." She added: "We are still definitely looking into it. It's not that we're not." Belated coverage would be better than none at all. But readers should be suspicious of the failure of the New York Times to cover this story during the crucial first days after it broke. At some moments in history, when war and peace hang in the balance, journalism delayed is journalism denied. Overall, the sparse U.S. coverage that did take place seemed eager to downplay the significance of the Observer's revelations. On March 4, the Washington Post ran a back-page 514-word article headlined "Spying Report No Shock to U.N.," while the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that began by emphasizing that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are "long-standing." The U.S. media treatment has contrasted sharply with coverage on other continents. "While some have taken a ho-hum attitude in the U.S., many around the world are furious," says Ed Vulliamy, one of the Observer reporters who wrote the March 2 article. "Still, almost all governments are extremely reluctant to speak up against the espionage. This further illustrates their vulnerability to the U.S. government." To Daniel Ellsberg, the leaking of the NSA memo was a hopeful sign. "Truth-telling like this can stop a war," he said. Time is short for insiders at intelligence agencies "to tell the truth and save many many lives." But major news outlets must stop dodging the information that emerges. ____________________________________________ Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," published by Context Books (www.contextbooks.com/newF.html). Background link: accuracy.org