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

To: Bilow who wrote (130929)	5/2/2004 12:04:31 AM
From: h0db	Respond to of 281500

LOL, Carl. So you are voting for a continuance of the unintended consequences of Bush's presidency, not his vision, politics, or leadership.

To: Bilow who wrote (130929)	5/2/2004 12:07:40 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

Anything new on North Korea? Yesterday, FL posted that Kim Jung Il hasn't been seen since that train explosion. And news reports are that approximately half the injured are children who were wounded in the face and front of the body, consistent with their facing the train at the time of the explosion, maybe waving as some important personage passed by? But the photos on Yahoo, NYTimes, etc., don't appear to be of anything other than a largish explosion.

To: Bilow who wrote (130929)	5/2/2004 10:06:25 AM
From: Sig	Respond to of 281500

<<<Hi hodb; Re: "Carl, how do alliances fit into your neo-isolationist Utopia?" <<<I didn't call it a "utopia". Those are your words, not mine. I don't believe that a utopia is possible on this planet, so I'm not willing to send US soldiers to die in a hopeless attempt to make one. >>>> Name one man in the Administration who has mentioned creating a Utopia in Iraq or elsewhere. <<<By "alliances", I assume you mean "military alliances". I don't think we should be isolationist as far as non military alliances.>>> We have alliances wherever we go in politics or business. Since Saddam had alliances, whether written or not, with so many Western countries and Eastern thru oil dealings we were unable to form an alliance acceptable to the UN because France took a unilateral position and blocked a Resolution vote regardless of other UN voices. France-unilateral OK US- unilateral not OK <<Military alliances are needed for war, and for the threat of war. At this time, we have no war, and no threat of war.>> War on terror maybe? <<If something pops up like Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, we will still be able to put together an international coalition to take care of it. In that sense, it is not necessary that we have alliances prior to that event. We are enough of a power in our selves to get the ball rolling.>>> Obsolete thinking here. 911 demonstrated that we need preemptive action and time to prepare. If we wait for Saddam to attack Kuwait he has already raided the city, killed a lot of people, stolen the gold and art treasures, destroyed their military and we will be fighting on friendly soil. If Kim decides to send a nuke into S Korea we would be way too late to save our friends. Todays complaint by many is that we do not have enough troops to use in Iraq. Who is going to respond elewhere if we cannot? <<<What you need longstanding alliances for is to prepare for very big wars. Our NATO and other anti-communist alliances were of that type. The recent collapse of Communism leaves us with no reason to keep our alliances active. That is, we should have friendly relations with Britain, France and Germany, but we have no reason to combine our militaries into some sort of super super power. We're already the sole superpower, that's enough.>>> What good does it do us to be a superpower when we are hamstrung by 400 treaties , by votes in the UN, by rules of the Geneva Convention ? I agree that a major war is remote >>> Even after there is another superpower, we do not need alliances (just as we did not have alliances between 1800 and 1917), unless that superpower threatens us militarily. And by "threatens us", I mean really threatens us, not in the sense of the utopic definition of threatens: "could possibly do the least little amount of harm to us". So in some ways, I approve of Bush's many destructive actions against our longstanding alliances with powerful nations like France and Germany. By alienating these countries, Bush has done much to bring about the military isolationism that I wish to see. He's already pulled most of our troops out of Saudi Arabia. The infinite sink in Iraq will force him to pull out of places like South Korea and Germany. And the eventual pullout of Iraq will leave us with the least number of military alliances we've had since 1941. That's one of the reasons I will probably be voting for him again.>>> Not bad. But our Military is not being forced to do anything. We merely respond to changing tactics by the enemy. A negative attitude by the Press or the public could force changes in employment of the military, so we can defeat ourselves. Sig