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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (41468)	5/3/2004 9:32:14 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793917

You really have to try hard to report that bit of news as other than good news. Tell that to the markets. They don’t seem terribly impressed. Personally, I’m fairly optimistic on the economy, though there are major points of vulnerability. If Bush wins a second term, he will have to cut spending in a serious way, and that is difficult to do. The elderly, the military, and the farmers are all key Republican constituencies, and if you put those aside as sacred cows, there’s not a whole lot of room left for cuts. If this administration has to choose between doing what’s popular and doing what’s necessary, I’d expect them to take the former course. Not a lot of character there. At this point I’d vote for Bush over Kerry, though I’d have to fight to keep from retching at the thought of voting for either of them. I think the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror has been self-defeating and will ultimately leave us more vulnerable to terrorism, but I fear protectionism, which is emerging as a key item in the Democratic platform, more than I fear terrorism. It’s interesting that all the real successes in the war on terror have come from the quiet war, in which intelligence operatives and small military forces track down individual terrorists, usually with the cooperation of other countries. The grand showpieces have not fared so well. The Afghan operation (necessary but grotesquely mishandled) and the Iraq war are rapidly becoming liabilities and threaten to become disasters. There might be a lesson there, if anyone cared to see it. While Americans focus on Iraq, a potentially much more serious problem is developing along the Afhghan/Pakistani border. Despite much sound and fury, Pakistani forces have (surprise, surprise) accomplished absolutely nothing in their operations against AQ and Taliban forces, which still use the area freely. US operations in Afghanistan cannot succeed while this safe haven remains. The Pakistanis are exceedingly sensitive about the possibility of American intrusion, and even the slightest hints that US operations in Pakistan are being considered create an uproar. If we don’t go into Pakistan, we can’t go after AQ; if we do, we may very well bring Musharraf down, or force him to back away from us. We all know where that could lead. Islamic bomb, anyone? How about 60 of them? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are bigger problems than Iraq, just as they were before the Iraq war. We chose not to deal with those problems, because we wanted to be seen using large-scale force and that tactic was not appropriate for dealing with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Instead of moving on, after Afghanistan, to the next most serious problems and devising tactics to address them, we chose the tactic we wanted to use and looked for a place where we could use it. That choice served to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, our problems in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and might very well come back and bite us on the ass one day.