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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (16446)	4/10/2006 9:27:08 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541736

Daadler and Gordon's approach is a perfectly reasonable one. Daadler, in fact, advocated something like this approach as a guest blogger on Josh Marshall's blog site within the past several months. They, of course, dismiss the putative Bush approach of using "force" as they put it. Here's their view of why that's wrong. This view, too, is wrong. U.S. air strikes probably could destroy Iran's critical nuclear facilities -- at least those we know about. But our intelligence is hardly perfect, so we would not really know if Tehran's nuclear program was in fact destroyed. A military attack against Iran would also undoubtedly generate strong public support among Iranians for an otherwise unpopular regime. Any lingering doubt that they needed a nuclear deterrent would be erased. And are we prepared for what Iran could do in return? Through its Shiite partners in Iraq and Afghanistan, it could wreak havoc on our forces and undermine our efforts to stabilize both countries. It could threaten oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, through which more than one-third of the world's oil flows, and urge its terrorist friends to launch retaliatory strikes against our allies and us. If one made a sort of artificial dichotomy between soft and hard diplomacy, they are arguing for something more like hard diplomacy. Which would be effective seem to me to depend on highly situational judgements dependent on a great deal more knowledge than either of us are likely to ever have. The major point of their argument, for our conversational purposes, is their rejection of "force". That's not only the nuclear option, which I suspect they are as startled to read about as the rest of us, but bombing campaigns in general. However, they have left out of their argument the destruction that the Bush administration has done to the good will, both domestic and foreign, that's a necessary component of all foreign policy. I'm afraid that limits options even more severely than they say. They are addressing policy issues but the actual implementation of policy depends on politics. And the politics of the moment on these issues make the policy a completely different one. The Bush folk need to rebuild the trust factor. Or we simply wait for a new administration. My guess is it will be the latter.