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To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (154086)	3/10/2003 10:14:59 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

<<...Sometimes our approach to Iraq takes on a sort of Strangelove quality...>> Misreading Power By William Raspberry Columnist The Washington Post Monday, March 10, 2003 washingtonpost.com Sometimes our approach to Iraq takes on a sort of Strangelove quality. That is, in order to accomplish the perfectly rational goal of disarming Saddam Hussein, President Bush has to give a convincing impression of a crazy man -- a Texas-tough megalomaniac who will let nothing shake him from his war-bound course. But the strategy works only if Bush assumes the Iraqi madman is rational enough to know when he's been outbluffed. The fear is that one (or both) of these men will overplay his hand and hurl us into a war no sane person could want and whose most serious casualties could come after the bombing stops. How did we come to such a pass? Bruce Jentleson, who is unusually smart about such things, thinks at least part of the explanation lies in the syllogism that seems to drive the thinking of the president, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. The syllogism, starkly put, is: We are the most powerful nation in the world. We want to do good things. Getting rid of Hussein is a good thing. Therefore, we have both the power and the moral duty to rid the world of Hussein -- no matter what the rest of the world thinks. The premises, if Jentleson is right, are so deeply held by these administration "hawks" that they are simply accepted as facts from which the rest of the policy flows. Unmatched power plus good intentions is enough to reshape the world. "But this is a misreading of power," says Jentleson, director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. "Military power and influence are not the same thing. They believe our power is so great that we can accomplish our goals through force and intimidation and resolve. But there are only a few things you can get me to do by hitting me over the head. At some point, I have to believe that what you want me to do is in my interest, too." Jentleson says U.S. policy needs to confront two questions. First, how great is the threat from Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction? Second, how good is our strategy? "There's no doubt in my mind that the world would be better off without Saddam," he says. "But if our strategy for achieving that goal is no good, we may wind up getting rid of Saddam without resolving the underlying problems." Jentleson, a former State Department planner and arms negotiator and onetime foreign policy adviser to Al Gore, fears that the hubris of its hawks has the administration in a position where it feels it has to keep pressure on Hussein by dismissing as too little or irrelevant his grudging destruction of his weapons of mass destruction. Hussein, meanwhile, may well interpret that unrelenting pressure as evidence that the Bush administration wants him dead, whether disarmed or not -- in which case he should do as little as he can get away with. Worse, says Jentleson, Hussein's give-a-little, wait-a-little tactic splits our allies, leading Hussein to believe that he can do as well by temporizing as by disarming. It might even be true. Surely it must be getting harder, even in the administration, to play the lone-wolf role in circumstances where we are not directly threatened. And the longer we delay, the harder it will be to attack without looking like the neighborhood bully. "The truth is, action against Saddam -- military or otherwise -- can work well only if our side is unified," says Jentleson. "The United Nations can't succeed without American power, but American power by itself can be a long-term loser -- it could produce such a costly victory as to amount to the same thing." But why has unity been so hard to come by? At least in part, says Jentleson, because of our approach. "The Bush administration has created so much resentment in the world with its unilateralism. 'Axis of evil' may be a catchy phrase, but it suggests the replacement of the pragmatism that has marked our dealings in the world with an ideology -- and a religion-based ideology at that. And calling Europeans names -- that's just silly. "The president is tenacious. I'll give him credit for that. But tenacity without judgment doesn't give him the credibility he needs in the world. I suppose he would say that he's tried nonmilitary approaches, but what he's done is so halfhearted that it amounts to checking off boxes, waiting for diplomacy to fail so we can go to war. If we'd been genuinely trying over the months, we might have had both unity and results." And now? "It's still not too late, but it will mean real diplomacy, at the head-of-state level, to get us back to a unified approach." © 2003 The Washington Post Company