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

To: geode00 who wrote (198765)	8/23/2006 1:42:56 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

One of the consequences of the Treaty was that nation states are supposed to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their boundaries (among other things, the Treaty also set firm, recognized boundaries--something that had been more informal prior to that time--and it was that very informality that had led to numerous disputes and excuses for disputes in the past). This means that militias such as Hezbollah or Hamas or Sadr's Army or, for that matter, White Supremacy militias in this country, are illegimate and must be disarmed. If they aren't typically causing any problems, no one bothers them. But the government of the territory is still responsible for their actions. If the government can't disarm them, it simply means that it is no longer the government of that area--the militia, in effect, is. But of course, the distinctions in this case are far more fuzzy than they typically were back in the 16th and 17th centuries, where the private militias were usually of particular princes in relatively small territories. One of the purposes of the Treaty was to try to reign in those princes so that they wouldn't cause any more trouble than they already had--their squabbles could get very messy and have all sorts of wider unintended consequences. The world was getting too crowded and the armies getting too big to continue to allow these armies to exist. The nation state was the entity that was supposed to engender order in this miserable state of affairs. And, believe it or not, compared to the chaos and destruction of the Thirty Years War, it succeeded pretty well. That is as much as you're gonna get from me. It is, admittedly, a very quick and dirty account. Read the book. You say you don't have time, but if you spent just a couple of hours a day for a few weeks, you would read a good a deal of the book, if not finish it. And still have plenty of time to rant on the web.

To: geode00 who wrote (198765)	8/23/2006 2:48:25 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush Faces Revolt on Iraq ______________________________________________________________ By Olivier Knox Agence France-Presse Tuesday 22 August 2006 Washington - US President George W. Bush has defiantly reaffirmed his "stay-the-course" message on Iraq, even as some of the unpopular war's strongest defenders have turned critical ahead of key November elections. With just over two months before voters decide who controls the US Congress, Bush took pains on Monday to confront candidates, overwhelmingly opposition Democrats, who want to set a timetable for a US withdrawal. "Any sign that says we're going to leave before the job is done simply emboldens terrorists," he said at a press conference. "We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake." But more than a few politicians and commentators once firmly in Bush's camp have joined the doubters on the war, which has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and the lives of more than 2,600 US troops. Republican Representative Walter Jones (news, bio, voting record), who once helped rename French fries "freedom fries" in anger at Paris's opposition to the conflict, reversed course in June 2005 and urged Bush to set a withdrawal timetable. Michael Fitzpatrick, another Republican representative who backed the March 2003 invasion, has reportedly branded both his Democratic rival - a decorated Iraq war veteran who supports a US redeployment - and Bush as "extreme." "Congressman Fitzpatrick says no to both extremes: No to President Bush's 'stay-the-course' strategy, ... and no to Patrick Murphy's 'cut-and-run' approach," said a Fitzpatrick campaign flier described in the Washington Times. Moderate Republican Christopher Shays, who backed the use of force to oust Saddam Hussein, told the Washington Post last week that he would propose a time frame for a US withdrawal from Iraq. And in one of the most high-profile campaigns, the Democratic Party's Senate primary in Connecticut, a political novice who opposed the war beat a well-established Democratic senator, Joe Lieberman, who strongly supported it. Nor can the president count on many conservative commentators who once offered full-throated defenses of his foreign policy and the Iraq war, in particular, and counted critics as irresponsible defeatists. "The big problem I have is that the US is not winning the war. Staying the course doesn't sound like a solution to the massive sectarian violence going on in Iraq," conservative economist Larry Kudlow said this week. Kudlow's comments, made in a public posting on the Internet site of the National Review magazine, a conservative stronghold, came a bit more than a year after the publication's April 2005 cover story declared "We're Winning." And earlier this month, the magazine's editor warned that "Republicans are seeking to win the midterm elections on national security at the same time they are losing, or at least not obviously winning, a major war" - Iraq. The column's title recycled a frequently heard charge among Democrats, asking whether the war had become "Bush's Vietnam?" And in one much-publicized case, a former conservative-lawmaker-turned-talk-show-host spent time with his guests discussing whether Bush's "mental weakness" hurt the United States abroad, while the television screen asked the question "Is Bush An Idiot?" While Bush has stood firmly behind his policy, and he and some of his top aides have accused Democrats of actively seeking defeat in Iraq and wanting to "cut and run," there are signs of deep Republican discomfort with the White House strategy - and its "stay-the-course" sales pitch. "The choice in this election is not between 'stay the course' and 'cut and run.' It's between 'win by adapting' and 'cut and run,'" Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said last week. -------