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

To: Neocon who wrote (102067)	6/19/2003 4:46:57 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

First, I deny that Afghanistan is a failure, it is merely not a finished project. I would agree with you if the Bush folk were genuinely putting resources into assistin Afghanistan. However, they are not and little to nothing seems to be going well. In fact, they simply don't wish to talk about it. And, even, if you will recall, left it out of the budget proposal for this budget year. What was that all about? Second, you have no real grounds to claim bad faith on the part of neoconservatives or the Administration. It is a mere prejudice. Don't recall using the words "bad faith" to describe the administration, as opposed to neoconservatives within it. What I did say, and I read this as fairly standard foreign policy practice--not admirable by any means but standard--was to offer a cover story to recruit the population into the plan but have real reasons that are different. If you think that's not common practice, then we are definitely living on different planets. As for the rest of the post, you've launched it at such an abstract level, it's hard to find a handle. So let me go back to my original argument which was about the foreign policy aims of different incarnations of the US government, not about some members of the government. So I'm comparing Bush with Clinton; not the neoconservatives in the Bush administration with Clinton. I still see some distinction in that I read Bush as using the neocon rhetoric, as I said before, to cover a global dominance agenda. As for more from your post, you argue they are concerned about human rights but I've yet to read much from neoconservatives about promoting human rights save the Chinese campaign which is really about anti-communism. Democracy, yes, it does appear in their rhetoric. As for cynical, if anyone is not cynical now, they have lost their sense of balance. Finally, I think the shoe is now on the other foot for people who wish to argue that the Bush policy in the ME and in Afghanistan is about the promotion of democracy and a growing economy (forget the human rights stuff since it's only an addon). Someone has to argue that policy implementation to date pushes matters in that direction. At the moment, we only have a policy whose obvious aims are to create client states for the US.