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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (111027)	8/11/2003 11:10:53 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But the NeoCons have been driving U.S. policy now, since September 2001. Almost 2 years. So they have a track record, a series of actions on which to judge them. And their actions have been to stand solidly with the Saudis. The deletion, for political purposes, of the Saudi connection to 9/11 in the report, is just one piece in a pattern. Your mistake is to assume that the gov't is in the hands of an all-powerful conspiratorial force - the NEOCONS - and that whatever is done reflects the NEOCONS wishes. A more realistic view is that the faction of the conservative movement referred to as neocons are only one influence among many which compete to push American policy in a desired way. The Saudi govt has been skillfully investing big bucks in Washington DC for a long time and has a lot of influence. The classification of the Saudi sections of the 9/11 report would seem most likely to be a result of Saudi influence - yes, even though the Saudi ambassador is publicly calling for the publication of the classified sections. Ask yourself who is likely to benefit from classification of the Saudi material. The Saudi govt clearly seems the most logical answer.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (111027)	8/12/2003 12:02:54 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

When I say that the NeoCons support Saudi Arabia, and look the other way at their fundamentalist anti-liberal global propaganda campaign, I am speaking about their actions, not their words. No, you're not, Jacob, you're speaking about the State Department's actions. The paid-for friends of Riyadh are in the State Department, or retired from it. The neocons have been yelling that the Saudis are not our friends as loudly as they can, echoed by friendly media such as National Review or the WSJ editorial page. As for neocon actions, the neocon policy, which did indeed push the war in Iraq, has resulted in American military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia (without it being seen as bowing to OBL's demand), moving of our bases to Qattar and Kuwait, and strengthening our ties with Jordan and Bahrain. In short, we have ended our military dependence on Saudi Arabia and lessened our oil dependence, since we now have a big say in what happens to Iraq's oil. And as a side effect, we have a large army sitting on the northern border of Saudi Arabia. If things work out, there will also be a democratic government in Iraq, just to the north of Saudi Arabia, very likely one that allows the Iraqi Shi'a considerable autonomy. If you were a Saudi prince, how would all of this look to you? I submit that it wouldn't give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, particularly if you remember that not only do the Saudi royals hate the thought of democracy, but their rule is particularly oppressive to the Saudi Shi'a (Wahabbi ideology and all that). And where do the Saudi Shi'a live? In Saudi Arabia's eastern provinces, next door to the Iraqi Shi'a - and over the oil fields.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (111027)	8/12/2003 1:21:07 AM
From: Sultan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good old days when only politicians in India, Pakistan and other poor and corrupt third world countries could be bought.. The process here is much more refined..

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (111027)	8/12/2003 4:15:54 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

He Saw It Coming _____________________ The former Bushie who knew Iraq would go to pot. By Fred Kaplan Slate.com Updated Tuesday, August 5, 2003 slate.msn.com <<...Among the many remarks that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz no doubt wishes he hadn't made, the following, from prewar congressional testimony last February, stands out: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." It's one thing to be wrong. It's another to be incapable of imagining yourself wrong. Much of what has gone wrong in the Bush administration's postwar Iraq policy can be attributed to a failure of imagination. But there was no excuse for this particular failure. In the previous dozen years, U.S. armed forces had taken part in five major post-conflict nation-building exercises, four of them in predominantly Muslim nations. There is a record of what works and what doesn't. Had Wolfowitz studied the record, or talked with those who had, he wouldn't have made such a wrongheaded remark. Through much of the Bush administration, Wolfowitz could merely have picked up the phone and called a colleague named James Dobbins. Dobbins was Bush's special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan. Through the 1990s, under Presidents Clinton and (the first) Bush, Dobbins oversaw postwar reconstruction in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. Now a policy director at the Washington office of the Rand Corp., he has co-authored a book, America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (released just last week), which concludes—based on research done mainly before Gulf War II got under way—that nearly everything this administration has said and done about postwar Iraq is wrong. One pertinent lesson Dobbins uncovered is that the key ingredient—the "most important determinant," as he puts it—of successful democratic nation-building in a country after wartime is not the country's history of Westernization, middle-class values, or experience with democracy, but rather the "level of effort" made by the foreign nation-builders, as measured in their troops, time, and money. To see just how wrong Wolfowitz was, look at Dobbins' account of how many troops have been needed to create stability in previous postwar occupations. Kosovo is widely considered the most successful exercise in recent nation-building. Dobbins calculates that establishing a Kosovo-level occupation-force in Iraq (in terms of troops per capita) would require 526,000 troops through the year 2005. A Bosnia-level occupation would require 258,000 troops—which could be reduced to 145,000 by 2008. Yet there are currently only about 150,000 foreign (mainly American) troops in Iraq—about the same as the number that fought the war. To match the stabilization effort in Kosovo, Iraq should also be protected by an international police force numbering 53,000. Yet those 150,000 soldiers now in Iraq are also doing double-duty as cops...>> cont. at: slate.msn.com