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

To: LindyBill who wrote (79335)	10/20/2004 11:53:21 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

Membership in the Core means nukes don't matter Barnett ¦"Brazil Agrees to Inspection of Nuclear Site: A compromise over access to a uranium enrichment plant," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 20 October 2004, p. A6. ¦"Nuclear Nightmare," op-ed by Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, 20 October 2004, p. A27. The International Atomic Energy Agency gets permission from Brazil to fully inspect a nuclear enrichment plant. There had been some balking in the past, but guess what? It all happened with the UN Security Council, without any threats from Core powers, without any effort on the part of the Pentagon. That's membership in the Core. Bob Samuelson points out there are now 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, down from 65,000 during the Cold War. There's your peace dividend. There's your expanding Functioning Core. Where do the nuclear dangers still remain? Inside the Gap and North Korea, that island of Gap-dom stuck in an otherwise stable northeast Asia. North Korea is not a nightmare for anyone except North Koreans. Kim is the crazy uncle we keep in the New Core's attic—out of view, but kept alive with food now and then. It's time to exorcise this monster in the attic, not continue to give into his pathetic efforts at nuclear blackmail. Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 11:25 PM The faulty prewar intell on Iraq's infrastructure closed the 6-month window there ¦"Faulty Intelligence Misled Troops at War's Start," by Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, 20 October 2004, p. A1. Talking to Civil Affairs officers who were over there in Iraq in the months immediately following the end of the war there, you discover how shocked they were at the level of infrastructure decay and looting. The intell community should be blamed for the first, but the blame for the looting belongs to everyone involved on our side. By choosing not to flood Iraq with peacekeepers following our Leviathan's sweep toward Baghdad, we let that inevitability unfold (hell, people loot in America with hurricanes and tornados!). If we're not that stupid in our own country when disaster strikes, how could we have been so dumb in Iraq? By not disaggregating the debate between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Army Chief of Staff Shinseki. The former argued for a small transformed force to win the war, while the latter argued for a large old-style force to guard the peace. That conversation was conflated into the "debate on how to conduct the war," when in reality it was a two-part debate about a two-part sequence. Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett