The Democrats....

Many people are asking me whom I support in the 2004 Democratic Primaries. Well, I’ll give you a short history of my political thought on this subject and bring you where I am today. First I was adamantly pro-Dean. I believe the only one who can take on Bush is going to have to be tough, someone who cuts the chase and tells you how it is, someone who won’t sugarcoat and meander around all the important issues. I also liked Dean because from all reports, he was a very moderate governor – fiscally conservative, but still had his social priorities straight – like health insurance for all children in the state. He also seems to know how to mobilize otherwise politically apathetic voters.

Then Dean seemed to be pandering farther and farther to the isolationist left. I don’t mind at all that he didn’t support the war in Iraq, and didn’t pull a Kerry by supporting it just so it’d look better on the campaign trail. But he started talking about repealing “every cent” of the Bush tax cut, balancing the federal budget even when the economy is sinking, and supported withdrawing US troops from Iraq to be replaced with international troops. To me, all of these are really bad ideas. Not only are they bad ideas, but they’re unelectable ideas. One cannot expect to get voted into office under the promise of taking back at least $200 from almost every American family.

So I then threw my conditional support to Clark, someone who just recently joined our fair party. He’s a four-star general, which is about at tough as it comes, and an intellectual as well. He even taught economics at West Point, which is not exactly a bad trait for a President. He seemed to hold all the best traits of Dean, but also seemed very electable. Who better than a former NATO commander to refocus the war on terror, and not sound like a hippy peacenik by opposing the Iraq war?

Well, my support for him has fizzled. I still think he’s the most electable of this motley ensemble. But he’s come out against financing the rebuilding of Iraq, which is a terrible idea. Even as an ardent fighter against this war, it is our mess nonetheless and I believe we need to clean it up – no matter what the cost. This is war, and this is the price of war. Furthermore, he stumbles around – he flip-flopped on his position on Iraq. Now I hear he supports a flag burning ban amendment to the Constitution. Wow... (not that I support flag-burning, but a Constitutional Amendment?! When we learn out lesson about prohibitive laws against the citizenry in the Constitution)

Most of the Democratic candidates, Lieberman aside, are in pure reactionary mode. They want to revoke and undo everything that Bush has done in his 3 years thusfar, and that’s just empty rhetoric. I want substantive ideas, not regression. We need to work with what we have, not pretend we’re going to pick up where Clinton left off in 2000. The fact of the matter is Bush has changed the course of America in his 3 years, and doing a 180 in reaction wouldn’t be more disasterous than his own foreign policy.

I don’t fully support any of them. I almost trust Bush better with foreign policy now, simply because he’s obviously contained/preoccupied – if not humbled – and will more than likely not embark on any more “regime change” adventures in the Middle East. He broke it, he needs to fix it. I honestly would feel very queasy about handing Iraq over to Dean, who will muddle it up worse by withdrawing under fire. One does not withdraw from combat because of a 2/10ths of a percent casualty rate. That’s a surefire way to ensure the war on terrorism is skewed towards to Jihadist.

Dean is right that the Democrats lost the mid-term elections because they did not distinquish themselves from the Republicans. Bush-lite is not a viable option for a Democratic presidential candidate who wants to win the general election, but it unfortunately like only the Anti-Bush will win the nomination. We Democrats need to learn some lessons from the the Republicans - find leadership, create a solid agenda and push it hard , let the American public see these leaders push and explain this agenda, and maintain tighter party discipline.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Democrats Primaries 2004 election Dean Kerry

The V-Word

The V-word seems to have become the first “politically incorrect” word that the rightwing has adopted. It carries with it the painful memories of their generation, and a painful legacy taught to ours. There are as many theories as to what went wrong in Vietnam as there are people who experienced or studied it.

I fear that because the memory is so painful, and carries with it so much weight, that it has become impolite, if not taboo, to talk about it in context to our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hear people on the radio allude to Vietnam, then quickly write it off – bring up shallower points of pointing out just how different the geography is between arid desert plains and jungle. Though the geography and enemy are different, I have questioned how different the military strategies are in this war of terrorism with the military strategies of the Cold War.

Though we ended up winning the cold war, we won all of our battles politically – not militarily. Let us remember that Korea was no great victory. We were pushed out of Pyongyang by the Chinese and came to a stalemate at the 38th parallel. This is now the DMZ between North and South Korea still zealously guarded by over a million troops on both sides, even though the Berlin Wall has long sense come down. Vietnam was... well, Vietnam. Central America was a covert bloody mess for us too. Let us not forget whom we empowered to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, lest we forget September 11. I think there are strong lessons and parallels that we must draw from to learn from our mistakes for sounder victories in the war on terror.

Secretary of State Colin Powell fought in Vietnam, and applied our lessons their to a self-named doctrine that I hope the Bush Administration is working with today. The doctrine consisted of understanding your political objectives, matching political objectives with military objectives if necessary – creating a clear and concise mission, with a clear and concise exit strategy. Following this would prevent open-ended wars like Vietnam, with military goals that were impossible to accomplish without working against political objectives.

Unfortunately, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recovering from a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad, he continued to speak of “transformation” of the Middle East. Though indeed a democratic and libertarian transformation of the Middle East would be amazingly helpful in the war against terrorism, we must ask how well this can be accomplished with Abram’s tanks and Apache gunships and how long that would take. Though these machines were meant to end the cold war, we must remember that World War III never happened – it was statecraft and triumphs of will that brought an end to that affair.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency Vietnam Quagmire Exit Strategy

saboteurs of hope

I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in Iraq. It’s such a strange occurrence that terrorist acts are going unclaimed. Even the most atrocious suicide bombings in Israel tend to have several claimants. The Pentagon has painted the terrorist and guerillas all to be former Ba’athist. This might well be true, but this is also the most convenient excuse for the Pentagon, so I am more than a bit skeptical.

It’s very difficult fighting an anonymous enemy. Though this enemies name might be a mystery, its motives are revealed through its tactics. The tactics have been blatant use of force against infrastructures designed to make life easier on common Iraqi’s. Oil pipelines have been by and large kept down and unusable through persistent attack. This prevents oil money from entering the country through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The United Nations and now the Red Cross have been suicide bombed, the UN twice. Other NGO’s and IGO’s are fleeing as well because of this –including Doctors Without Borders, one of my favorite charities. Those who work with the CPA, particularly Iraqi Police, are being targeted.

All of this has one clear aim: make life miserable for the occupiers and the occupied. Unfortunately, the secular Ba’athist and militant Islamists, as well as regional governments, have reason to want the Iraqi’s to shrug off the Americans or the Americans to shrug off the Iraqi’s. I don’t know that this means that they are working in tandem though.

These attacks are only getting worse, and I imagine they will sustain at their current level if nothing else. What this means is that American’s must have a stomach to weather through this storm. Unfortunately, August 19th and October 28th don’t quite carry the same national resolve as September the Eleventh. Bush must work to set clear and reasonable goals, considering the reality of the situation, to provide a timeline and/or conditions of a return of Iraqi national sovereignty.

I don’t know what an appropriate exit strategy at this point is. I do feel that if Bush chooses to not leave before squashing this rebellion, we might well be there past is potential second term as President expires. Unless a new counter-insurgency doctrine makes it’s way from West Point or Washington think tanks to the Pentagon in the next few months, we ought not expect an end to this resistance against us or the sovereign Iraqi government for quite some time. We ought also to weigh how much our continued overt presence only helps the attacks by encouraging alienated and despondent Iraqis to abed these saboteurs of hope. Even through all it’s shortcomings, our involvement in Afghanistan perhaps ought to be the framework in Iraq as well.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency

I should be posting more soon. My Oct 1 blog is being published this week, which means I have to write something new for the Spinnaker - which will be posted here.

I saw Noam Chomsky tonight at UF. Interesting fellow... maybe quirky is a better word. He was a horrible speaker, honestly.... he speaks like William Saffire writes.... kind of a coherent rambling of facts and/or observations with little holding them together... no central thesis... and i disagree with him on a lot, i see him sometimes as a glorified conspiracy theorist. He's so far out of the mainstream and ignores the conventional wisdom to draw complete pictures which makes for interesting, but often very flawed, theories. One thing he did say struck a cord with me:

"Fundamentalism is destroying this world: be it religious or market fundamentalism"

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Noam Chomsky