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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (113910)	9/4/2003 4:34:31 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<You'd be urgent to do exactly WHAT, Jacob?> My Blueprint for Victory: Message 18801778 <Urgently succumb to whatever demand your enemy required of you?> You see the world as a wolf pack, where every male has to either fight constantly to maintain his Alpha Male status, or submissively roll over and expose his belly. I don't accept that, as the only available model for human interaction. I Believe in Kant, not Hobbes. <Would you have said the same thing to FDR over Pearl Harbor?? Or more applicable, what about Wilson with regard to WWI...> I support a Constitutional Amendment, to take war-making power away from the Congress (where the Founding Fathers put it), and away from the President (the unconstitutional method we've used for the last 50 years). I'd have wars declared by a 2/3 majority of the electorate. That, along with universal online voting, same-day voter registration, a $100 tax rebate for voters, and universal net access. Technology makes direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy) feasible, for the first time ever. The world is slowly moving toward this; more and more, decisions and institutions are only legitimized by the direct approval of the people. The last U.S. Presidential election, done unconstitutionally (where does it say that the Supreme Court decides?), and yielding an absurd result (one guy gets the most votes, the other guy becomes President), has made me a Believer in Direct Democracy. WW2 and Afghanistan would have gotten that level of support, after Pearl Harbor and the WTC. WW1 wouldn't, since Wilson won the Presidency in 1916, with pacifist and isolationist campaign promises. He promised to keep the U.S. out of the war, and that's what the American people voted for. Just like Bush the Lesser campaigned as a semi-isolationist and Realist. Would the world have been a worse place, if we hadn't entered WW1? Did we fix anything, by our intervention? <Please apply this to how the US dealt with both the USSR and Communist China after each exploded their first nuclear device?> We adopted a Realist containment policy, and it worked. We left them alone, did not threaten them in their homelands. Wars were confined to the periphery, to areas not-core to either side. Since only utopian NeoCons think we can keep N. Korea or Iran from getting nuclear weapons, we have no choice but to adopt the same containment policy with them. Which the Administration seems to be realizing, belatedly, after 2 years of bluster and bullying. ("Speak loudly, and use up your stick elsewhere", is their motto) The Control Freaks in Charge have recently realized they are out of troops for further adventures, so the calls for Regime Change in the rest of the Axis of Evil have stopped. The real problem happens, when nuclear weapons get in the hands of non-status-quo non-State players: Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Queda, the Badr Brigade. This is coming, as night follows day. Not today, not next year, but it's coming. The Control Freaks cannot stop it, no matter how authoritarian and violent a policy they pursue. Based on our track record, we'll probably kick the can down the road, worry but take no effective measures, and be surprised (and blame everyone but ourselves) when Shit Happens. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Mahatma Gandhi