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

To: FaultLine who wrote (118685)	11/5/2003 7:30:03 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 281500

Ok.

To: FaultLine who wrote (118685)	11/6/2003 10:21:16 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives Joshua Micah Marshall From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003 America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003, 238 $22.95 Summary: Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay take stock of the Bush revolution in foreign affairs. The neocons have been running the show -- and we're all now paying the price. Joshua Micah Marshall is Editor and Publisher of the Web site Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com). ____________________________________________________ Days before the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom this past March, a well-known intellectual close to the White House walked me through the necessity and promise of the coming invasion. Whatever rancor it caused in the short term, he said, would pale in comparison to the payoff that would follow. In the months and years to come, Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam Hussein's tyranny would write books and testify to the brutality of the regime, the bankruptcy of the Arab nationalism that stood idly by while they suffered, and the improvement of their lives. That testimony and the reality of an Iraqi state where basic human rights were respected would shatter the anti-Americanism that fills the Muslim Middle East and start a wave of change that would sweep over the region. It was a breathtaking vision, and one that was difficult to dismiss out of hand. But from the vantage point of late 2003, it seems little better than a fantasy. To be sure, the war did eliminate a dangerous and evil regime. But the Bush administration greatly exaggerated the scale and imminence of the danger Saddam posed, while dramatically underestimating the cost and burden of the postwar occupation. The prewar links between Iraq and terrorism proved to be as minimal as skeptics had charged. And the Iraqis' feelings toward their liberators turned out to be more ambivalent than Washington had assumed, the regional ripple effects less extensive, and the diplomatic damage of the whole episode worse and longer lasting. The Bush administration's foreign policy has played out equally poorly on other fronts as well. The administration came into office scoffing at Clinton's "appeasement" of North Korea, and soon stiffened its hard-line stance further by including Pyongyang in the "axis of evil." But after the North's clandestine uranium enrichment program was disclosed in late 2002, the administration slowly backtracked. The White House is now not only negotiating with Kim Jong Il and discussing a security guarantee, but it has even broached the possibility of granting him more aid before he dismantles his nuclear programs -- a line the White House repeatedly pledged not to cross. The grand result of the Bush team's tough approach is that North Korea now has two ongoing nuclear weapons programs, while U.S. relations with South Korea have deteriorated dramatically. foreignaffairs.org