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

To: Bilow who wrote (128822)	4/9/2004 10:09:20 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

A "real" realist, John Mearsheimer, was on The Newshour last week. He agrees with you. I don't know about Lugar and Hagel, but Biden (I think) may believe that he isn't in a position to say that there is no solution. He is in a policy making position, he has to advocate something. He, like me, rejects that there are just two possibilities--withdrawal or (in effect) nuke 'em. People in policy making positions have to, well, make policy. Of course, Biden had a chance to support the Byrd amendment--which would have forced Bush to come back to the Senate for another vote before waging actual war--during the 2002 debates and didn't. I still can see him leaning toward Byrd, and saying, "I know what you're trying to do, and I respect that, but I'm not going to tie the President's hands here" or something like that, and Byrd shook his head, grimacing all the while. They shoulda listened to the old buzzard, he is a smart man. I hope he lasts as long as Strom did, or at least one more term. He looks like he has a mild case of Parkinsons, he shakes, but his voice sounds strong, and he can still think and wave the his torn and tattered copy of the Constitution around with vigor. And he speaks more eloquently than almost everyone there. An excerpt from the Newshour: JIM LEHRER: Mr. Mearsheimer, in general terms, is this going to work? JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us. What it's going to do, is it's going to enrage more of the population and make them more sympathetic to the Iraqis. And even if we shut this down in the short-term, we still have the long-term problem that we have no political institution inside Iraq that we can turn power over to on July 1. We also suffer greatly from the fact that the Iraqi security forces that we have been building up over the past year are effectively melting away and many of those forces are joining insurgents. It's very hard to see how getting tough with the Iraqis is going to solve the problem. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that it is going to work if we back off either because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents. The insurgents will grow stronger. So we're in a hopeless situation. Either way we turn we lose. Get tough or step back? JIM LEHRER: But a hopeless situation still has... somebody's got to do something. So somewhere in there, do you see a combination of toughness and a soft approach working at all? JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don't think you can combine the two. I think you have to either be tough, you have to increase the number of forces there and get tough, or you have to keep force levels regards low and back off. Those are the two broad choices. And the problem that you face is no matter which one you do, you lose. It's just a matter of choosing your poisons here. We have got ourselves in a situation where there doesn't appear to be any solution. This is a lot like the spring of 1968. It's as if LBJ called you on the telephone and said we just had the Tet Offensive, what do I do? I don't know what I would have told LBJ at the time, and, in retrospect, I don't know what I'd have told him, and I certainly don't know what I'd tell George Bush if he called me. link to whole interview pbs.org