I'm glad you introduced hope. Every time I speculate on Iraq, I couch what I say with hope. So, I hoped that the troop build-up would be enough to force Saddam to become submissive. Until the UN events made it impossible for the troops not to invade Iraq.
Then my hope was minimum casualties - which seems to be the intent and one that has been properly carried out. I'm somewhat worried about the Baghdad situation, but Basrah seems to be slowly going down with hardly any civilians becoming casualties.
Many civilians appear to be leaving the city, which is good. These small cities near Baghdad are becoming resistance centers for remnants of the Guard and "Saddam's Fidayi". I fear that civilian casualties will mount in these intense fire-fights.
As soon as the invasion was a reality, I changed to what might be good about the war. What good things might come out of it. It looks to me like a Czechoslovakia problem, or a Yugoslavia problem. In fact it looks like an Iraq problem. Our attempts in the past to put together manufactured States containing various factions haven't exactly been larded with success.
However, we have the mightiest military force in the world there. If we choose to use our power well, we might be able to make the area something more than an service station for the world.
Also, as I've said, maybe this will be the breakthrough in the Israel/Palestine problem. A Palestine State coming down heavily on Hamas and the Jihad, allied to US pressure on Israel to retreat from the West Bank, might just pull it off.
Well, I'm optimistic. But, I think that you are over-optimistic believing that if we had done nothing all might have been well in Iraq. There is not a shred of evidence that this might be so. The pressure to make Saddam do something was exerted by American and British troops and not by the UN.
As I said to Karen, once the troops were there, it would have been madness to withdraw them.
You hang your disagreements around Bush's policies, yet he isn't alone. You blame him for:
Ill advised domestic tax policy.
I agree. Yet, he is little different from the rest of them inside the Beltway. It's good Keynesianism to use government policy to prop up a sagging economy. (We are all Keynesians now.)
So the tax cut differs among our politicians only in degree and its direction. It's perfectly valid Keynesianism to give a tax cut to those who might then invest and strengthen the economy. Not so valid to those who might use it to pay off their credit card bills.
Yet, none of the politicos know what they are doing and they don't read history - not even recent history. Clinton raised taxes by "the largest peacetime tax increase in history" - according to the Republicans, which should have knocked the boom sideways. It didn't. So, why expect a moderate tax reduction to boost the economy?
Well, it won't. Neither will the other idiocy, reducing interest rates. But Bush and the Republicans don't know what to do about the economy, neither do Gore and the Democrats.
In fact, as I have often repeated, not only do our neo-Classical economists not know why we have a recession - they don't even know why we had a boom.
It is likely that the Administration hopes that the wave of euphoria that may well sweep the nation when the war is immediately concluded will swing us up into the next cycle of business activity.
"rash foreign adventurism"
If it works, he's a genius, if it fails he's a goat.
As far as it goes - seems to be working.
"lack of any concern for social or environmental issues"
Perhaps it depends on your political inclinations.
Scientifically, Kyoto was ridiculous. It deserved to be abandoned.
Up in the Wildlife Refuge, if we drill it is unlikely that any lasting damage would be done to the herds. If we interfere with their calving grounds, calves may be fewer - as happened several years ago when they were kept from their grounds by an adverse environment.
Meantime, the caribou affected by the first pipeline have increased 500%, though doom was forecast when the pipeline first went in.
I'm a free trader. I think there should be no barriers to people or goods anywhere in the world. So, I am against drilling in the Refuge. (The best thing about this thoroughly inhospitable area is its name. About 90% of it is wretchedly unfit for man or beast.)
I think we should use up everyone else's oil before we touch our own. We should also use up Canada's forests before our own. The purely political tariffs against BC timber were disgraceful.
Oh, I'm not trying to destroy North American forests. In fact, the US annual wood count has increased every year since the mid 20's (at least up to a few years ago). It gets tiring to keep up with reality when often zealous advocates won't listen to anything factual anyway, because they have completed surrounded the truth.
Of course he did want to put arsenic in everyone's water.
But, shallow thinking? Don't see much evidence of it. He seems to know what he wants to do - then he does it. What a pity he doesn't know the right things to do.
But, then neither do his adversaries.
Harry -----------------------------------------------------
Pete wrote:
Hi Harry:
On Thu, 03 Apr 2003, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[I had written}
To my thinking, I agree with the view that the moment the troops crossed the border, Bush had lost, it is just a matter now of waiting now to see how much and how badly, and how much can be salvaged by postwar bridge-mending and statesmanship (a concept so far apparently
utterly foreign to the current administration)."
I happen to think there is chance we've all won. Don't let your lack of appreciation for Bush to color your approach to everything.
Well, I really hope so, but I fear just the opposite. And I really don't have any personal opinion about Bush as an individual, I watch actions, not personality. I like to always expect the best of everyone, and always assume clever and thoughtful motivation first, but I just really find it very hard to find a way to fit that model to the actions taken by this president. Ill advised domestic tax policy, rash foreign adventurism, lack of any concern for social or environmental issues, all combine to paint a picture of shallow thinking. Try to merge the idea of cautious, thoughtful, sharp analytical minds with american foreign relations actions to date, and you can only come up with scenarios of grave secret emergencies, desperate enough to justify sacrificing wide swaths of foreign relations. So the choice seems to be between conspiracy (or, I guess, paranoid fantasies of imagined threats), and stupidity.
The point of my initial comment, if it must be spelled out, is quite simple. The discovery of instruments of torture does not make the war a better idea than it was, because their discovery was fully expected by those who have cautioned against the war, and won't influence the minds of people who see this as an unforgivable incursion of foreign infidels into their realm.
The question I keep coming back to is what's the rush? Excessive speed seems to be the main feature of the folly here. Given a couple of years, much of the problem of Iraq could have been resolved peacefully and with no negative diplomatic consequences. An adjustment of the sanction regime to expose the Iraqi populace to western largesse could undermine the dictator's authority without any need for military action. How many Iraqi's could be won over to the american vision for the million dollar cost of each bomb and cruise missile spent in this war? Whenever I see a miilitary action, I consider how it looks through the filter of the adage: "do I not destroy my enemies if I make them my friends?"
-Pete Vincent
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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