----- Original Message ----- From: "Gautam Mukunda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 1:06 PM Subject: Re: war and peace
. > > Hi Dan - sorry - if it wasn't clear, I was replying to > Marvin, not you. Oh, that makes a lot more sense. >I pretty much agree with what you're > saying, except that from what I've heard, the Bush > Administration has put a lot more thought into > post-war Iraq than you're giving them credit for. If that's true, why are they wasting a golden opportunity in Afganistan? Everything I've read indicates that little has been done in the past year to try to rebuild that country. I would have been more than happy to approve a significant nation building program. Bush could have used the bully pulpit to rally Americans towards rebuilding. > This Administration has a penchant for the secretive - > too much so even for me, and I'm very sympathetic to > such concerns - and they just don't seem to be talking > about it much, but I think there is a real vision for > post-war Iraq and a committment to being there for a > very long time. In fact, I would expect that we will > soon be moving bases from Saudi Arabia and Qatar into > Iraq and establishing an effectively permanent > presence there. Moving bases doesn't seem to be the hard part to me. Working with a variety of factions seems much harder. As an experimentalist at heart, I would have loved for us to have worked hard over the last year on rebuilding Afghanistan's infrastructure. Helping to build/rebuild mosques, schools, roads, sanitary water facilities, sewage plants, etc. seems very reasonable. And, of course, working on eliminating land mines, but I'm guessing that's being done without much fanfare. If the Administration is actually doing all that, and not publicizing it, I'd be shocked, because it would mean that they lost their PR touch. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
