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

To: LindyBill who wrote (107254)	4/2/2005 2:19:47 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 793800

"I remember a host of reasons given, you want to pin it on WMD" Actually John & his peers want to pin it on "stockpiles" of WMD's & nothing else. Unfortunately, revisionists will have to contend with the real fact that Bush repeatedly insisted that Saddam comply with every aspect of the Gulf War Cease Fire Agreement when he spoke publicly about Iraq prior to Saddam's removal. I've documented a number of instances quoting Bush verbatim.... Message 20911765 For those who don't know.... The Gulf War Cease Fire Agreement - AKA - UN Resolution #687, was a ZERO TOLERANCE policy. That meant Saddam had to; 1) Completely eliminate every aspect of his WMD PROGRAMS (not just "stockpiles"). This included provisions for the complete destruction of all offensive weapons. This had to be done in a completely verifiable manner to UN Inspectors. 2) Saddam had to completely eliminate every tie to terrorists (internal & external). 3) Saddam had to completely halt his crimes against humanity. 4) Saddam had to make full reparations to Kuwait, ET AL. Now this was the short & sweet version. There were absolutely no provisions that allowed any deviation from each explicit requirement. It meant 100%, unconditional compliance. Every single UN Resolution, including Resolution 1441 was irrevocably tied to #687. Saddam spent more than 12 years in utter defiance of every one of the above requirements before Bush's so-called "rush to war". You know, where "Bush lied & misled" America into a "unilateral", "illegal" war to take over their oil for his Big Oil cronies? Text of UN Resolution 687 dalebroux.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (107254)	4/2/2005 2:09:16 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 793800

The overall mission of the Bush admin after 911 was to break the pattern of the governments in the ME. I see you have given me the argument about historical revisionism. That's fine. It's a placeholder now but will be important for future reference. As for the present, I agree that your statement is definitely the public position of the Bush administration. But there are all sorts of motives/ideas/agendas/whatnots floating around as bits and pieces in the background that fragment that message and, at times, undermine it. A short list: (1) the old Cheney/Rumsfeld, et al argument (and sometimes neoconservative one) that the US needed to flex its muscles so that it would be taken seriously as a superpower--nothing to do with Democracy--everything to do with yet another internal justification for invading Iraq--too weak to give a good account of itself in combat; (2) the protection of Israel (that one is buried deep for the moment but in historical recounting of this period may yet appear again); (3) worries about oil and the global economy. No doubt, if we sat around and tried to grow this list, it wouldn't take much watering to do so. It won't surprise you that I don't see this crew as the idealists that the Wilsonian appelation seems to grant them. As for the ME anthill kicked open and lots of folk running for cover, that's a very nice line. You could have career running a blog (g). That may well be the outcome, as I said before. It may also be that the anthill lets some genuinely strange creatures see the light of day in regional civil war(s) and a kind of ethnic cleansing that makes Bosnia/Kosovo look tame. As for academia, the short of my disagreement with you is that the political is not that big a deal for most academics. There a few committed/strident/argumentative/takeyourpick types on both the left and right (more obviously of the former than the latter, on that I agree with you). But for most politics simply doesn't play a role. Most are much too busy trying to do what they do as well as they can within the structures given them (which if you wish to argue about those, please be my guest; one of the great curses of academia is a structure which does not reward good teaching, yet gets tons of money from families to pay for it).