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

To: michael97123 who wrote (147330)	10/7/2004 5:18:51 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 281500

I doubt it. If we pull out now leaving unfinished business, who do you think would support a re-entry... especially in lieu of all the resistance for even being there currently. I imagine it would take super catastrophic events. I didn't see the world trade center bombings as an actual threat to the country. It was a single terror event. I don't imagine we would have support to go back in to Iraq unless our country were in eminent danger...and that could be too late. Let's finish what we started. The sun is shining, let's make hay before it is too late.

To: michael97123 who wrote (147330)	10/7/2004 5:39:40 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush is beginning to sound desperate ___________________________________ By Howard Fineman MSNBC contributor Updated: 4:50 p.m. ET Oct. 7, 2004 msnbc.msn.com ST. LOUIS - George Bush's real political enemy now isn't so much John Kerry as it is the flow of the news. Not long ago, Kerry's decision to attack the president as commander-in-chief (remember all those Swift Boat vets in Boston?) was dismissed by analysts (including me) as naïve at best, folly at worst. Well, it may turn out to have been the move that wins this race. Presidential campaigns take on a life and shape of their own in the last stretch and this one now has. It's the president desperately trying to tear down Kerry as the news tears down the president. Good things are happening in the war on terrorism — the voting in Afghanistan, for example — but they are all but unnoticed in the rising flood of stories from and about Iraq. As things now stand, Bush is left with only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam's capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not "gathering," under the weight of inspections. We now know to a relative certainty that there were no WMD, no relationship with al-Qaida to speak of, no close ties to other major terrorists, and that, in the view of Paul Bremer — Bush's own man in Baghdad and a fellow Yalie — the Bush administration pretty much botched the occupation. One new poll out shows that half the American people now think the war in Iraq was a mistake; as that number rises, and it will, Bush's fortunes will decline, as they are now doing. History shows that only one challenger in modern times has been behind in the AP poll on Labor Day and come back to win. That challenger was Ronald Reagan. Now Kerry is no Reagan, not by a long shot. But if people conclude that Bush was profoundly wrong to have gone to Iraq, Kerry doesn't have to be Reagan. This campaign so far has been almost exclusively, increasingly, about the war in Iraq. On one level, Kerry's "position" is a contradictory bundle of confusion. He says the war was a mistake, but he's the guy calling for a gung-ho strategy in Fallujah to root out terrorist nests. As the president has pointed out, Kerry is claiming he can win the support of allies even as he dismisses the contributions of existing ones and calls the entire war a diversion — and even as France and Germany already have said that they aren't going to rally to our side if Kerry wins. But if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, Kerry's "vision" — or lack of it — matters less. Many observers have said the Bush team was too smart by half in insisting that the first debate be about foreign policy and defense — that is, Iraq. I am told that this wasn't done out of arrogance or ignorance; it was done that way in part to leave them plenty of time to repair any damage if Bush screwed up. But the problem is that the White House isn't really in control of events. They can wheel in Dick Cheney to make the case for "pre-emptive war" better than the president did — but they can't control what goes in Iraq, or, just as important, the media coverage of what goes on in Iraq. Cheney won the veep debate on style points — he was suitably grave and grown up — but as the event fades into obscurity it's clear that John Edwards did what he had to do: Remind voters again and again that Iraq is a flat-out mess. The focus on Iraq is harmful to the president for another, less obvious reason: It keeps him from shoring up his weaknesses on domestic issues. Most polls show the Democrats and Kerry leading on the most important of those issues: health care. Bush needs to be fighting on that turf. He was planning to do just that in Pennsylvania this week, in a speech about medical malpractice in Wilkes-Barre. But that speech was scrapped in favor of an all-out attack job on Kerry. The switch was revealing and, for Bush, ominous. The second and third presidential debates will shift the focus — the second, part way to domestic matters; the third, all the way. Bush's aim will be to paint Kerry as an unpalatable liberal who accumulated nothing but bad Big Government ideas during his 19 years in the Senate. Kerry will answer, essentially, "I'm a Democrat." In normal times that would not be a good enough answer, but if the tide of dissatisfaction with Bush as commander-in-chief rises high enough, being a Democrat — in other words not George Bush — may be good enough.

To: michael97123 who wrote (147330)	10/7/2004 10:22:25 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush is dead wrong __________________________ By Joseph Stiglitz Wednesday October 6, 2004 The Guardian Many around the world are surprised at how little attention the economy is receiving in President Bush's re-election campaign. But I am not surprised: if I were Bush, the last thing I would want to talk about is the economy. Yet many people look at America's economy, even over these past three-and-a-half years, with some envy. Annual economic growth - at an average rate of 2.5% - may have been markedly slower than during the Clinton years, but it still looks strong compared with Europe's anaemic 1%. But these statistics mask a glaring fact: the average American family is worse off than it was three-and-a-half years ago. Median income has fallen by over $1,500 in real terms, with families being squeezed as wages lag behind inflation. In short, all that growth benefited only those at the top of the income distribution, the same group that had done so well over the previous 30 years and benefited most from Bush's tax cut. For example, some 45 million Americans have no health insurance, up by 5.2 million from 2000. Families lucky enough to have health insurance face annual premiums that have nearly doubled, to $7,500. Families also face increasing job insecurity. This is the first time since the early 1930s that there has been a net loss of jobs over the span of a presidential administration. Bush supporters ask: is Bush really to blame for this? Wasn't the recession already beginning when he took office? The resounding answer is that Bush is to blame. Every president inherits a legacy. The economy was entering a downturn when Bush took office, but Clinton also left a huge budget surplus - 2% of GDP - a pot of money with which to finance a robust recovery. But Bush squandered that surplus, converting it into a deficit of 5% of GDP through tax cuts for the rich. The productivity growth that was sustained through the downturn presented an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity: if the economy was well managed, the incomes of Americans could continue to rise as they had done in the 1990s. The challenge: to manage the economy so that growth would be robust enough to create the new jobs required by new entrants to the labour force. Bush failed the challenge, and America lost the opportunity. True, the economy was stimulated a little by the tax cuts. But there were other policies that would have provided far more stimulus at far less cost. Bush's objective was to push forward a tax agenda that shifted the burden away from those who could best afford to bear it. Bush's failed policies have cost the economy dearly, and have left it in a far weaker position going forward. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office agrees that the deficit will not be eliminated in the foreseeable future - or even cut in half, as Bush has promised. Expenditures on which America's future economic health depends - infrastructure, education, health and technology - will be crowded out. Because fiscal policy did not stimulate the economy, a greater burden was placed on monetary policy. Lower interest rates worked (a little), but for the most part by encouraging households to refinance their mortgages, not by stimulating investment. The increased indebtedness of households is already leading to higher bankruptcy rates, and will likely dampen the recovery. National debt too has risen sharply. The huge trade deficit provides the spectacle of the world's richest country borrowing almost $2bn a day from abroad, contributing to the weak dollar and representing a major source of global uncertainty. There might be some hope for the future if Bush owned up to his mistakes and changed course. But no: he refuses to take responsibility for the economy, just as his administration fails to take responsibility for its failures in Iraq. In 2003, having seen that its tax cuts for the rich had failed to stimulate the economy, the administration refused to revise its strategies. In August, I joined nine other American Nobel prize winners in economics in signing an open letter to the public. We wrote: "President Bush and his administration have embarked on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of our nation ... The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem." Here, as elsewhere, Bush is dead wrong, and too dogmatic to admit it. ____________________________ Joseph Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel prize winner guardian.co.uk