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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Machaon who wrote (3217)	3/26/2003 12:05:54 PM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21614

"As we grieve for the victims of this war, we pledge to redouble our efforts to put an end to the Bush Administration's doctrine of pre-emptive attack and the reckless use of military power." Two Movements The new alliance between antiwar protesters and foreign-policy realists The antiwar movement is actually two rather different movements that partly overlap. One movement is in the streets and on the internet -- often led by radicals, sometimes joined uneasily by liberals. The other is pragmatic and mainstream. Both were nonplussed but only temporarily by the outbreak of war, and neither has gone away. Realist critics join the Bush administration (and most street protesters) in believing that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator and a menace to world peace. But they differ profoundly on the question of how to deal with such menaces. One first principle is multilateralism. A second is containment. As eminent realists critics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt wrote in the journal Foreign Policy, prior to the invasion, "Both logic and historical evidence suggest a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now and in the event Iraq acquires a nuclear arsenal. Why? Because the United States and its regional allies are far stronger than Iraq. And because it does not take a genius to figure out what would happen if Iraq tried to use weapons of mass destruction to blackmail its neighbors, expand its territory, or attack another state directly." "The war includes its aftermath," says Jessica Matthews, president of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, another leading antiwar realist. According to Matthews, the challenge now is to "repair the damage that has been done to Atlantic, bilateral and international institutions and relationships. The key question for the American people to debate is: Do we want to run an empire and behave like an imperial power?" How convincing the realist critique turns out to be, of course, will depend both on the war and its aftermath. Most realist critics emphasize: -- The damage to international institutions and alliances that the U.S. particularly needs in an era of global terrorism and nuclear proliferation -- The plain unreality of the assumption that unleashing a war of "shock and awe," will either build stable democracies or tilt the regional balance of power in the Middle East in America's favor and increase the odds of an Israel-Palestine settlement -- The engendering of anti-American feeling both among America's friends and adversaries -- The diversion of attention from homeland security and other important domestic issues Robert Borosage, of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, observed, "It's astonishing that Republicans in Congress supported a budget resolution with massive tax cuts, the very week that America went to war, and they let the administration refuse to even estimate the costs of war or occupation. With domestic programs being slashed, this will be a huge issue." The American Prospect supported the invasion of Afghanistan and opposed the administration's Iraq policy and its wider doctrine. As a forum for foreign-policy realists, I suspect we speak for a lot of Americans. As the battlefield smoke clears and the collateral damage becomes apparent, a mainstream movement opposed to future Iraq wars and supportive of multilateralism is only likely to grow. Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect. prospect.org