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

To: Bilow who wrote (146162)	9/22/2004 12:04:41 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

*NPR's Fresh Air Show has National Security Expert Richard Clarke on Today... Clarke is the former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism. He held the position in President Clinton's administration and continued for President Bush. He resigned in March 2003. His new book is Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. In the book he criticizes the Bush administration for failing to heed warnings about al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and for invading Iraq without evidence of a connection to al Qaeda. Clarke also worked for the Reagan Administration and the first Bush administration.

To: Bilow who wrote (146162)	9/22/2004 12:40:40 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The latest from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo... (September 22, 2004 -- 12:24 AM EDT) In the final throes of a presidential campaign, the depth and breadth of a foreign policy debate are necessarily highly constricted. I am extremely pleased that John Kerry is now making the case against the President's Iraq policy in an aggressive and frontal fashion. But the thrust of that critique is inevitably on the policy's manifest failures rather than its intellectual and policy underpinnings. A side note: It's revealing -- and the Kerry campaign should make something of it -- that whenever Kerry attacks Bush's management of the war all the Bush team can do is attack the alleged contradictions in Kerry's position on the war. That may work politically. But it's awfully telling. They have, quite literally, no response on the merits. Kerry should point that out and tell the president to stop making excuses for endangering the country. In any case, back to the debate over foreign policy and war. If you're interested in getting more deeply into the questions raised by the Iraq war -- not WMD and troop strength, but the mix of empire, violence and democratic idealism -- I cannot recommend strongly enough John Judis' new book The Folly of Empire. The book is half history, half polemic. Much of the historical focus is on America's experience as an incipient imperial power from the final years of the 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th century. The key events are the bloody war America fought to put down the Philipine rebellion and the ill-fated American intervention in Mexico. This Judis contrasts with a very different approach to foreign affairs that prevailed -- with relative consensus and consistency among presidents of both parties -- from Franklin Roosevelt until Bill Clinton. It was a model that in key ways grew out of the sobering experience of this imperialist interlude when America's deep-seated and in most ways benign missionizing impulses were wedded to the imperalism that would soon shake Europe, and much of the globe, to its foundations. The image of Teddy Roosevelt that emerges from this book is very different from that which has been in vogue in recent years in Washington, DC. And in our current moment, when TR and Wilson loom so large in our historical imagination and disfigured latter-day versions of them direct our nation's affairs, it is an instructive examination of how the thirst for domination can masquerade as idealism, often in a toxic fashion fooling even itself. With the US completely isolated and in a Mesopotamian snake pit, it's not hard to argue that President Bush's own special model of petulant unilateralism has been ineffective in securing American interests and security. But if you want to get more deeply into this -- how lessons of the past were ignored, how vacuous idealism can slide into hubris and then disaster -- this is the book... amazon.com Soon, another recommendation of a very different sort of book about empire: Hugh Thomas's new Rivers of Gold. -- Josh Marshall Copyright 2004 This document is available online at: talkingpointsmemo.com

To: Bilow who wrote (146162)	9/22/2004 1:10:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush Taunts Kerry ___________________________ By Juan Cole* Tuesday, September 21, 2004 I just heard President Bush taunt John Kerry for suggesting that the US was not safer because Saddam Hussein was deposed, and for saying that the US was in fact less safe because of the chaos in Iraq. Bush attempted to turn this statement around and suggest that Kerry was preferring dictatorship to democracy. Iraq, however, does not have a democracy, and cannot possibly have a democracy any time soon because of events such as those described below (and they are only 24 hours' worth)-- that is, because of a failed state and a hot guerrilla war. Moreover, if Mr. Bush abhors dictatorships so much, why hasn't he overthrown that in China? North Korea? Zimbabwe? Or, say, Egypt? There are enormous numbers of dictatorships in the world. Is the US to overthrow them all? Putin's decision to appoint provincial governors rather than allowing them to be elected (as though Bush should appoint the governors of US states) is a step toward dictatorship. Shall we have a war with Russia over it? Surely the conditions under which the Palestinians live in the West Bank are a form of dictatorship (they haven't voted for their Israeli military rulers). Why not invade the West Bank and liberate the Palestinians? Obviously, what was obnoxious to the American people about Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. Those are a dime a dozen and not usually worth $200 billion and thousands of lives. It is that he was supposedly dangerous to the US because, as Bush alleged, he was trying to develop an atomic bomb. But whatever nuclear program he had was so primitive as not to be worth mentioning, and there is no evidence that Saddam posed any threat at all to the United States' homeland, or would have in his lifetime. I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush's cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place. How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment? posted by Juan @ 9/21/2004 06:10:52 AM juancole.com *Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan