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

To: tekboy who wrote (78398)	2/28/2003 12:35:40 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Lindy compared my expression of the foreign policy professionals' hauteur or "God complex" with that of doctors, and I think that's not such a bad analogy. OK, let's continue it. 1) The Doctors: The Foreign Policy Experts 2) The "comatose" Patient: The Country 3) The Family with the right to make the decisions: The Politicians The Doctors advise, the Family makes the decisions, the the Doctor does as he is told, or quits. Or, if I own a Business, and call an expert in to advise me, I then decide what is the best way to go. History is filled with cases where the "Experts" were wrong about what should be done. They are always right in retrospect. That is why "Experts" advice is delivered with a lot of "on one hand, but on the other hand." We were all exclaiming over the quality of a book from last year that showed that our top Leaders had ignored, modified, or rejected the advice of their respective Military Leaders and have been successful. To rephrase a famous quote. "Foreign Policy is much too important to be left to the experts."

To: tekboy who wrote (78398)	3/1/2003 2:20:04 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

My bone of contention with the "foreign policy professionals" is that, like many professionals, they sometimes lose sight of the forest for the trees. Not to pick on John, but he often times exhibits the model behavior to which I refer: he ignores the content because the form is incorrect, the sources are improperly cited, or the voice is not sufficiently bland. Professionals develop an insular culture which becomes so rigid with care for protocol, that they become paralyzed. When the history is written, nobody will remember whether Bush was nice to the French and followed proper protocol for being snippy to each other. They will remember whether Chirac, or Bush, was RIGHT. Derek

To: tekboy who wrote (78398)	3/1/2003 7:16:49 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Some interesting comments from Shibley Telhami... Taking of Iraq Could Create Wider Woes, Scholar Predicts He says millions of Arabs would be angry, motivated by Jonathan Curiel the San Francisco Chronicle Friday, February 28, 2003 commondreams.org <<...Although President Bush believes a war with Iraq will bring democracy to the country and foster democratic reform throughout the Middle East, a scholar of the region says the conflict would create more authoritarianism among Arab regimes desperate to quash dissent, lead to more anti-American sentiment and foment more "demand" for terrorism. Speaking to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor, said millions of Arabs would be angered by a post-Hussein Iraq where U.S. troops are keeping order -- and that this resentment would drive more people to lash out at Washington and support groups like Hamas that advocate suicide bombings in Israel and other forms of violence. "There is a supply side and a demand side to terrorism," Telhami said on Wednesday night, in a talk that was recorded for broadcast on National Public Radio. "On the demand side, you have an environment where people are willing to participate, to be recruited, to provide funds, to provide the support that groups (like Hamas) thrive on. If there is this demand, you can destroy a group (or depose a leader) and the demand will create another group the next morning. The problems that give rise to this demand side cannot be addressed militarily."...>> <<...Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of a new book, "The Stakes: America and the Middle East," said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a much bigger priority of the Bush administration because so much of the Arab world sees Iraq and other foreign crises "through the Israeli-Palestinian prism." "It is their prism -- in the same way that, since 9/11, the issue of terrorism has become the prism through which Americans are looking at the Middle East and the Islamic world. I've done surveys in five Arab countries. The vast majority of people say the Palestinian issue is the single most important issue to them. "War with Iraq won't change the reality that the Palestinian-Israeli (conflict) will be the key to the fundamental relationship between the United States and the rest of the Middle East." On the subject of Islamic terrorism, Telhami said that "a war in Iraq will lead to more instability and more motivated recruits. Al Qaeda proliferates in areas of instability. States can be deterred and defeated by powerful states, but you can't deter shadowy nonstate groups. "The reality is that, after a year-and-a-half of the most powerful country in the world putting all of its resources on the line . . . most of al Qaeda's fighters (are) hiding not in the states of the 'axis of evil' but in unstable regions of friendly countries -- in Pakistan, in Afghanistan." Telhami, who is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said "humiliation" is the biggest factor behind Middle East terrorism. ". . . The driving force in the Middle East today that leads to so many people willing to be recruited into organizations that are willing to use ruthless means to change the status quo is not so much poverty . . . but humiliation and hopelessness," he said...>>