TA: We're talking about the government which took the United States to war. Had Gore been elected, he would have gone to war in Afghanistan, but I doubt he would have gone to war in Iraq. This is very much a neocon agenda, dominated by the need to get the oil and appease the Israelis.
Washington went to war mainly because the sanction on Iraq was unraveling, so I think that the Democratic White House would have been as belligerent toward Iraq as the Republican one has been, except a Democratic president would have given a bigger piece of action to the European power elites than the Republican one has.
A Democratic president would have been more aggressive toward Russia and North Korea than the Republican one has been.
DH: There are a lot of people who argue that personnel don't matter - that the war emerged from the inner needs of American capitalism, American imperialism. That it was the rate of profit, the oil price, that forced the hand, and whoever is sitting in the Oval Office is just a pawn of larger forces. Do you buy that?
TA: I don't buy that. If you believe that's all there is to it, then you can give up politics. Just wait at home for the big catastrophe.
The question doesn't make political sense, so the answer doesn't either.
Before getting to the point of actually being able to split the Democratic and Republican Parties, we need an intermediate goal: do what we can to make the next POTUS a weak president, rather than a strong one. To do so, we need to decrease the shares of popular votes that go to the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
