Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gamesmistress who wrote (20086)	12/16/2003 12:03:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793606

Dreams and Glory By DAVID BROOKS Howard Dean is the only guy who goes to the Beverly Hills area for a gravitas implant. He went to the St. Regis Hotel, a mile from Rodeo Drive, to deliver a major foreign policy speech, and suddenly Dr. Angry turned into the Rev. Dull and Worthy. The guy who has been inveighing against the Iraq war as the second coming of Vietnam spent his time talking about intelligence agency coordination as if he had been suckled at the Council on Foreign Relations. The guy who just a few days ago stood next to Al Gore as the former vice president called Iraq the worst mistake in American history has suddenly turned sober. Sure, he did get off a classic Deanism. He conceded that the capture of Saddam had made American soldiers safer, but, unwilling to venture near graciousness, he continued, "But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer." Still, the speech was respectable and serious. Coming on the same day as President Bush's hastily called news conference, it affords us the opportunity to compare the two men's approaches to the war on terror. And indeed, there is one big difference. George Bush fundamentally sees the war on terror as a moral and ideological confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny. Howard Dean fundamentally sees the war on terror as a law and order issue. At the end of his press conference, Bush uttered a most un-Deanlike sentiment: "I believe, firmly believe — and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it — that freedom is the almighty God's gift to every person — every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq." Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice, and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries who fear liberty for women. Furthermore, Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in this struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror. Judging by his speech yesterday, Dean does not believe the U.S. has an exceptional role to play in world history. Dean did not argue that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the world. Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and biological materials away from terror groups. Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems. The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral. At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible. In the world Dean describes, people, other than a few bizarre terrorists, would be working together if not for Bush. In the Dean worldview, all problems are matters of technique and negotiation. Dean tried yesterday to show how sober and serious he could be. In fact, he has never appeared so much the dreamer, so clueless about the intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us and with which real presidents have to grapple. nytimes.com

To: gamesmistress who wrote (20086)	12/16/2003 1:06:52 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793606

I suspect that if Dean had not led himself into this "Anti-War" swamp, he would have been the strongest candidate anyway. But he can't get out of it now. Taking On Mr. Dean The Democrats have one last chance to avoid a Dukakis-like debacle. Wall Street Journal Saddam Hussein's capture is playing as bad news for Democrats who want to retake the White House next year, but we'd say it's an opportunity. Democrats are getting one, last, pre-primary chance to stop themselves from leaping off the foreign-policy cliff along with Howard Dean. One of the mysteries of this Democratic Presidential contest has been why there has been so little debate over national security. Mr. Dean has led the pack into full-throated opposition to President Bush's anti-terror policy, and most of the candidates have followed him into the anger swamps. Saddam's arrest at least offers a chance to ask Democratic voters to consider if they really want to nominate a post-September 11 version of Mike Dukakis in a tank. Joe Lieberman was first into this much-needed breach, as you'd expect from a candidate who has been strong on Saddam all along. "This news makes clear the choice the Democrats face next year," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a much more dangerous place." The other candidate well-positioned to take advantage of Saddam's capture is Dick Gephardt. The former House Majority leader bucked the vast majority of his caucus to vote for war against Saddam, and unlike John Kerry he hasn't tried to run away from that record. Yesterday, he accused Mr. Dean of issuing "contradictory statements on Iraq over the last year" and using "this issue to constantly attack his Democratic opponents and to seek political advantage." Those contradictions include his assertion last February that "Saddam must disarm," even as he refused to support a credible threat of force that would compel Saddam to do so. More recently Mr. Dean has been insisting that the U.S. can't "afford to fail" in Iraq, yet he opposed President Bush's request for $87 billion to finish the job. Some had predicted that, as he got closer to the nomination, Mr. Dean would veer back to the center. But there was no sign of that yesterday, as the former Vermont Governor delivered a much-anticipated foreign policy address. "My position on the war has not changed," he told the Pacific Council on International Policy. "The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will help keep our soldiers safer. But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer." This line of thinking--that Saddam was a bad man but no threat to America or its interests--will certainly come as a surprise to the Clinton officials who called him such a threat many times. And we doubt most voters will believe in the unthreatening nature of a man who pillaged the Kuwaiti oil fields and would have probably taken Saudi Arabia had he not been pushed back at the cost of American lives and treasure. His other non-threats include attempting to assassinate George H.W. Bush. It's also not encouraging that Mr. Dean's first instinct in response to Saddam's capture was to call for taking "the American label off the war." He suggested seeking help from the likes of the U.N., which fled Iraq after the first truck bomb, and NATO, where France recently mocked an alliance request for more helicopters in Afghanistan. Now is precisely the time for the U.S. to press the intelligence advantage that resulted in--and should flow from--the capture of Saddam, not to give the Baathist remnants a breathing space. Mr. Dean has also just named a stable of foreign policy advisers from the dovish end of the Democratic spectrum. One of them--former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake--was responsible for squelching indigenous Iraqi efforts to topple Saddam in the mid-1990s. Ashton Carter was an architect of the failed arms-control strategy for resisting the former Soviet Union. Given all of this, it's a shame that most of the other Democratic candidates have allowed Mr. Dean a national-security pass. Retired General Wesley Clark had the resume to resist but as a candidate has been just as anti-war as Mr. Dean. This weekend he reiterated that "all of the concerns that I have voiced about Iraq remain." As for Senator Kerry, another great-looking resume, he has faded in the polls as even Democrats find his many flip-flops on Iraq an omen of weak leadership. He too declared that Saddam's capture is a chance to turn Iraq over to Kofi Annan's protection. Messrs. Lieberman and Gephardt are at least offering a choice, and not a post-Vietnam echo of Mr. Dean, and we hope they keep it up. By taking the debate to the front-runner, they may help save their party from repeating its post-Vietnam Cold War mistake of showing weakness on national security. After September 11, this is a losing platform. It's also bad for the country to have one of the two major political parties nominate a candidate whom voters won't be able to trust on the most important duty any President has. There's still time before Iowa and New Hampshire for Democrats to ask themselves if political suicide is really painless. opinionjournal.com