On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > What, btw, do you _want_ Marvin? If it goes well, > that's bad. But if it goes poorly, that's bad.
Sorry, that's my kneejerk pessimism again. If we > don't do this, Saddam eventually gets nuclear weapons. > If we do do this, there's no outcome that seems > favorable. What I haven't seen from you - from > anyone, but particularly from you, since I know you're > capable of it - is an argument balancing the risks of > action versus those of inaction. Yes, the war can go > badly. Look at the Middle East. Do you feel that > peace is going _well_? What, given the options, would > you do? At the moment we've run out of options, or squandered whatever options there once were, so I see no choice but to go forward with fingers crossed for luck. As for the "peace" I agree with Ronn that there isn't one. Several weeks ago in one of my musings, I said that one of the best arguments for war is that we're already at war & have been for over a decade, and we have to choose whether to win it or lose it. I even agree that Hussein would almost certainly have to have been disarmed forcefully at some point, that we were never going to negotiate or inspect him out of his WMDs. And yet. I feel that this particular course of action, and this particular timing, has pretty much been force-fed to the American people by a propaganda campaign based on scanty facts and half-truths to convince us all that Hussein presents to America the same degree of threat today that al Qaeda presented on Sept. 10, 2001. I feel the object of an, "If you can't blind 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" campaign. Which in turn makes me feel that the options for creating a broader world consensus for action existed and were deliberately discarded before they were ever explored. Why? Here's what I want. I want an America that went to the world a year ago and said that the cold-war era mission of NATO is over and that solicited a new or modified alliance of democratic nations whose purpose would be (in addition to mutual defense) to promote democracy and suppress terrorism along a carrot-and-stick model: on the one hand, unprecented amounts of aid for nations willing to democratize and pluralize their societies along with golden-parachute deals for leaders whose positions would be compromised by such changes; on the other, the promise of multilateral military actions against regimes known to fund & support terrorism or that otherwise pose a threat to the peace of the world. In other words, establish a western alliance to pursue not just defensive security but the kind of long term humanitarian good and political reform that must be the basis of long-term security and prosperity, and then place the war against Iraq within that context (if this involves acknowledging that the UN isn't up to the whole of this task, fine). Instead we have a rather vaguely defined war on terror that relies on evidentiary slight-of-hand to provide shaky justifications for a war on Iraq that shouldn't *need* shaky justifications, but we seem to have provided them as a kind of international pacifier, or because the domestic audience can be expected to swallow what Europe won't but we don't care too much about Europe anyway. I realize that such a plan would cause a huge amount of unhappiness for those nations that benefit from maintaining the status quo. But it seems to me that there are a lot of nations that would benefit from a new status quo, and if we had offered such a thing to the westernized world first, our motives in Iraq today would be far more credible. Maybe after Iraq something can happen. But I don't think it will because the US doesn't want to be tied down by friends. Friends have to be treated like peers, more or less, but treating people like peers means you can't always dictate terms. And we want to be in a position to dictate terms when we desire. In our recent diplomacy we seem to have treated our allies more like pets than peers. We certainly haven't helped the leaders of allied nations win points with their constituencies. So what I want now is (a) for the Bush plan to succeed and prove me an ignorant ninny, which I know that I am to some degree anyway since international politics is hardly a specialty of mine, and (b) to see evidence that the US will pursue a far more multilateral and proactively humanitarian approach for the sake of providing carrots along with the sticks we have in abundance; and, frankly, for the sake of keeping our own growing power in some kind of check. Sorry if this seems terribly naive, or naive in its cynicism, or whatever...I've already confessed I'm a third-rate wonk (if that). Marvin Long Austin, Texas Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Poindexter & Ashcroft, LLP (Formerly the USA) http://www.breakyourchains.org/john_poindexter.htm _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
