Hi Kelly, I'm not sure what you mean by America 'failing'. In the short term, I don't think the US, with its overwhelming military might, can possibly lose. In fact, I don't think there's ever been a better publicized (and promoted) war than this one. It's more than a bit remarkable to me that the process we just went through involved one country being forced to account for all its weapons, asked to destroy many of them, and then attacked.
But long-term, I think there is a real threat of failure, a failure of a system of multilateralism and interdependence. The Bush doctrine is little more than that of a bully pulpit--the strongest get to decide what is right. Perhaps in realpolitikal terms this has always been the case, but it doesn't make it just, moral, or fair. I'm not saying that the international system works perfectly, or even anywhere near as well as people might like, but that system was a hell of a lot better than the alternative. You ask whether Clinton was right to intervene in Kosovo. The same might be asked about the first Gulf War or Somalia or Afghanistan or a host of other cases. You wonder why there were not mass protests globally of the kind you see now. I don't know about the morality of any of those actions but I do know that generally speaking, respect for a world system was far more evident in either the Clinton or the Bush I administrations. And this is not a trifling issue. As much as the bull-in-a-china-shop diplomacy of Rumsfeld et al might think that talking is useless and treaties are for wimps, the reality is that international agreements are an integral part of the world system that has been constructed to this point. The Bush administration in choosing a very specific form of interventionism, ie unilateralism, is threatening to undermine the very basis of many of the initiatives engaged in by citizens across the world. How can the Bush administration claim to be protecting world peace by invading Iraq on the one hand, while at the same time dismissing internationally agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol or the International War Crimes Court? The rhetoric has always been that no single individual is above the law, but with actions such as this, the Bush administration claims that it is above the laws of the international community. I don't think that anyone's arguing for letting dictators run amok, or for genocide to be condoned. But the actions that the US administration is engaged in now are dangerously close to being both anarchic and characteristic of a bully. I think that the reason so many people across the globe are pissed off (and they are, with negative sentiment running high in countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, pretty much everywhere) is because no-one likes to be pushed around, no one wants to be told that someone else knows what's best for them, and especially so when the person telling you this stuff is both hypocritical and arrogant. Bush is indeed 'stepping up to the plate and risking everything'. What chills and appalls me is that people like him, his cronies, and all the other power brokers in all the other capitals across the world make these decisions that have long-term and immense impacts on our day to day life do so as part of a cold and calculating thirst for power. Morality and foresight simply doesn't enter into it. Pablo ___________________________________________________________ FoIB Mailing List - Bits, Analysis, Digital Group Therapy http://www.ianbell.com
