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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (24253)	8/5/2003 3:05:05 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

From: LindyBill Is Lieberman a voice crying in the wilderness? Yep. He will come out of Iowa and New Hampshire 3rd or 4th. Lieberman Warns Party On Ideology Candidate Assails 'Extremist' Policies By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 5, 2003; Page A01 Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), expanding a fight among Democrats, attacked former Vermont governor Howard Dean and several other rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, arguing that they have embraced extreme left ideas that threaten to return the party to political exile. Saying he is in a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, Lieberman said policies rooted in the "vital center" of the political spectrum, not what he termed the antiwar and big government policies of his rivals, provide the only hope of defeating President Bush. He warned Democrats that abandoning the policies that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 would result in a terrible setback for the party. "I share the anger of my fellow Democrats with George Bush and the wrong direction he has taken our nation," Lieberman said in a speech at the National Press Club. "But the answer to his outdated, extremist ideology is not to be found in outdated extremes of our own. That path will not solve the challenges of our time and it could well send us Democrats back to the political wilderness for a long time." The party's 2000 vice presidential nominee saved his toughest criticism for Dean, the upstart candidate whose passionate opposition to the Iraq war and pugnacious confrontation of Bush have propelled him to the upper tier of the Democratic race. But aides said Lieberman also had in mind two other rivals whom they see standing in the Connecticut senator's path, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) over trade, taxes and health care, and Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) for what he described as "ambivalence" over going to war in Iraq. Lieberman, who was one of Bush's strongest supporters in the run-up to the war in Iraq, has been struggling to find his voice in a year when his centrist ideas and restrained demeanor have appeared out of sync with many Democratic activists. He has led in several national polls for the nomination but he is behind Dean, Gephardt and Kerry in Iowa and behind Dean and Kerry in New Hampshire. Lieberman's decision to escalate his rhetoric over the direction of the party came on the eve of a candidate forum at the AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Chicago and ensures that the concerns about Dean's gathering strength and what it represents will continue to be a dominant feature of the battle for the Democratic nomination. A week ago, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), of which Lieberman is a former chairman, warned that the party is in danger of being captured by the "far ideological left" and other DLC leaders warned that a Dean nomination could result in the kind of landslide defeats Democrats suffered in 1972 and 1984. With Democrats focused on the two-day union meeting in Chicago, Gephardt continued his campaign to build momentum aimed at winning the AFL-CIO's endorsement this fall. The United Steelworkers of America scheduled a news conference to announce their endorsement this morning in Chicago, with a Gephardt adviser confirming that the former House Democratic leader was the union's choice. Tonight's 90-minute Democratic candidate forum will begin at 8 p.m. EDT and will be carried on C-SPAN. As Lieberman was delivering his broadside against what he saw as the leftward drift of the party, Gephardt was in New York offering more elements of an economic plan that would eliminate all of Bush's tax cuts and use much of that money to fund a health care plan designed to provide near universal access to health insurance, including a rise in the minimum wage, accelerated spending from the Highway Trust Fund and a federally guaranteed national development bank to help states through their fiscal problems. Gephardt said the Bush administration economic policies are decimating the middle class and described Bush's program as "Houdini economics because it almost takes a sleight of hand to make a multi-trillion dollar surplus disappear." Arguing that the Democrats had helped produce the longest-running expansion in history during the 1990s, Gephardt said, "President Bush has taken us right back to the broken policies of the past, the economics of debt and regret: unaffordable tax cuts for the few, zero new jobs, surging unemployment." Lieberman was equally unsparing in his criticism of Bush, saying the president "has left our country dangerously unprepared to defend against and defeat the threat of terrorism. And his leadership has clearly driven our great American economy right into the ditch." Bush, however, was a pretext to draw distinctions with his opponents. "If George Bush and his bankrupt ideology are the problem, old Democratic policies like higher taxes and weakness on defense are not the solution," Lieberman said. He said repealing all the Bush tax cuts, as Dean and Gephardt have proposed, would hurt the middle class; called Gephardt's health care plan a "break-the-bank $2 trillion program"; warned against raising "the walls of protectionism" on trade; and said the United States "must not shrink from the use of force when our security or our values are at stake." Together his speech provided a summary of arguments Lieberman began to make in May, at a Democratic debate in South Carolina, which his advisers said have become more relevant because of Dean's success and which they believe will crystallize the choice for Democratic voters more sharply. During the question period yesterday, Lieberman brushed aside repeated inquiries about the state of his campaign. "I feel good about where this campaign is," he said at one point. At another he vowed, "I'm not going to stand back and let this party be taken over by people who would bring us to the political wilderness again." washingtonpost.com.

To: lurqer who wrote (24253)	8/5/2003 3:17:03 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

America's First Empire Proved Costly, Frustrating A Century-Old Conflict Has Lessons For The Present Situation In Iraq by Larry Weaver Published on Tuesday, August 5, 2003 by the St Paul Pioneer Press It was a short, glorious war fought against an enemy that easily played its role as the personification of evil. Its military melted away quickly after offering poorly organized resistance. Outclassed, outplanned, outsupplied and outfought, the Spanish crown surrendered an empire to the United States in 1898 much as Saddam left us with a broken nation state in 2003. The costs of running the new empire did not figure very highly in the debate leading to the Spanish-American War. The sinking of the battleship Maine and Spain's deplorable behavior in Cuba occupied the public discourse the same way Saddam's record of evil dominated our recent discussion. The debate took place after the war. Could a Protestant, democratic, capitalist, Caucasian, English-speaking nation run an empire of dark-skinned, Catholic, Spanish-speaking, formerly enslaved subjects? Could a democracy run an empire, even if we thought it was only going to be for a short time? The question we face now is very similar. Can today's America, which still adheres to the same values we espoused a century ago, successfully answer the challenge of governing a Middle Eastern people who are accustomed to depending on the government for life's necessities? Forcing an answer to that question, as in 1898, is the fact that we are involved in a war with the very people we liberated. Ferdinand Aguinaldo led the Philippine resistance to Spanish occupation. He greatly aided the Americans in their campaign to defeat the Spanish. Aguinaldo cooperated with the understanding that after the war the Americans would leave and the Philippines would become independent. Our decision to stay led directly to a guerrilla war that tied down a large part of the Army for three years. Americans could not understand why we were not welcomed with open arms as liberating heroes. After all, we had liberated them from the cruelty of Spain and set free the inmates of concentration camps and prisons. The population did not express great devotion to Aguinaldo and yet they fought for him against us. The price of occupation climbed. The cost of administering and running the territory, combined with the bleeding of American troops trying to pacify the population, increased the fury of the debate. What followed is a pattern we have seen before: pacification campaigns, area searches, checkpoints, reprisals, assassinations and a level of violence that would have been impossible to accept today with a modern instantaneous media. The solution came in the form of the defeat and capture of Aguinaldo and the assumption that the revolt would end with the elimination of the leadership. This assumption proved mixed and the revolt continued for another decade (well past President Theodore Roosevelt's declaration that the war was over on July 4, 1902). THE COST OF WAR The guerrilla war gradually died. The resentment did not. For almost a century the United States kept the Philippines in colonial status or kept a large military presence there at a cost that cannot be properly estimated. In spite of our best intentions, the Philippine people held the United States responsible for a series of corrupt leaders whom we had at least tacitly installed. This short tale of a century-old conflict has interesting lessons for the present. The second war with Iraq was indeed short and relatively cheap in terms of blood and money. However, we have run into a similar post-war conflict, with Saddam cast as Aguinaldo and Bush playing the role of a 21st-century Teddy Roosevelt. The population of Iraq has met us with a little joy, a lot of resentment and rising violence. While the short-term problem may be reduced by the capture or killing of Saddam, the larger question that faced our ancestors is still to be answered: Can a republic founded on the precepts of democracy, fed by the power of regulated capitalism, and enjoying the legacy of centuries of Western European culture, run an empire? Have we seriously debated the point in public and made a conscious decision? Or, like our ancestors a century ago, have we merely stumbled into the situation with the best of intentions? Now is the time for debate and a clear decision. Does our position as the world's leading power mean that we are obligated to enforce a Pax Americana? If it does then we must be willing to face the price in blood and treasure. If we fail to make a clear decision, then the generation that bore the Vietnam War will leave a far grimmer legacy to generations that follow. ___________________________________ Weaver, an analyst and consultant for Synergy Inc. in Washington, holds a doctorate in the history of American foreign relations from Indiana University. © Copyright 1996-2003 Knight Ridder commondreams.org