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

To: tekboy who wrote (102433)	6/23/2003 9:21:05 AM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Any thoughts then on what should be done here? If they are all separate issues, should they be considered totally separate, or separately, but within a whole policy? That's the line of the day, but I just don't buy it. Radical Islamist terrorism, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran's quest for nukes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and politicosocioeconomic staganation in the Arab world are all separate issues. There's less linkage among them than one might think, I believe, and we have less influence than is often argued. The notion that these (countries and issues) are all a bunch of dominoes that were/are about to fall one way or another depending on what we do strikes me as unrealistic. (I know some smart and knowledgeable people who disagree with me on this one, and I can respect their positions, but I'll hold my ground on this one.)

To: tekboy who wrote (102433)	6/23/2003 10:56:46 AM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 281500

So I'd essentially have simply kept an eye out for evidence that such a long-shot event was happening or had happened, and if such evidence ever emerged, I'd just shift plans into a higher gear. Not a problem, because if one actually had such evidence, then it would have been much easier to get others on board. You'd have had, as it were, a real crisis, giving you just the casus belli you were looking for. What possible guarantee can anyone credibly give that Saddam would have been detected in time to do anything worthwhile about it? Not a guarantee I'd be willing to accept if I were GWB because mistakes are simply not allowed. I would rather see an error on the side of caution on this point. he'd ignore them [tail/dog charges], just as he did during the 02 election. A different and more difficult thing to do in a Presidential election in which the slings and arrows would have been aimed directly at Bush, not at a Senator or a Representative. it [roadmap] doesn't seem to be getting very far now. Correct. But like the folks who over-used the "q" word during the war, time may prove the nay-sayers wrong. I think, like Stephen P. Cohen thinks, that there are elements in place that are reasons for guarded optimism. Time will tell. HUH? We want stability? I should have used some bromide like "at the end of the day we want stability.." but it's so far from here to there that we seem to be the advocates of destabilization instead... Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. Facetious, I know, but the point is that the elements that promote the present lack of stability need to be removed, disempowered, whatever. Creative chaos. 0: The notion that these (countries and issues) are all a bunch of dominoes that were/are about to fall one way or another depending on what we do strikes me as unrealistic. (I know some smart and knowledgeable people who disagree with me on this one, and I can respect their positions, but I'll hold my ground on this one.) I don't see the Bush Administration thinking in terms of dominos but in terms of discrete problems, each with its particular solution. The one common ingredient I see is not a domino: preventing the wackos from getting their hands on a nuclear trigger. At the end of the day, Saddam was a festering pustule who simply had to go before he got into more mischief. We are engaged in containment but very few are noticing that it's on a much larger scale than simply Iraq. C2@lacucarachaatomica.com