In article <bts44b$22hc$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Starman says...

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=18904

Think Again: The Myths of National Security Credibility
by Eric Alterman
January 8, 2004
Eric Alterman

When it comes to framing issues of national debate, more often than
not, what a journalist does not say or write is even more significant
than what he does. It is, after all, the underlying assumptions of any
given issue that determine whether one party or another will be
perceived as more "credible" than the other. To take an obvious
example, if economic leadership were determined to imply "giving
massive tax cuts to the  wealthy," then clearly George W. Bush and the
Republicans would be in the ideological driver's seat. In such a case,
it would not be necessary for the White House to employ a bevy of
spin-based bait and switch tactics to cover up its miserable record on
job growth and deficit creation. 

While the conservatives have made great strides in recent times in
convincing reporters to treat economic news as the exclusive concern
of Wall Street and big business, their success in this regard is in no
way comparable to what they have achieved in the area of "national
security." The very words are deemed to put Democrats on the
defensive. This is not because of any objective standard to which
analysts or reporters can point. Did President Nixon make Americans
any safer with his illegal invasion of Cambodia and his willingness to
aid in the overthrow of the legally elected government of Chile? Did
President Reagan increase the nation's security by selling arms to
terrorists in Iran and Central America? Has President Bush done so by
alienating most of the world with his misguided adventure in Iraq as
he simultaneously ignores genuine threats to our homeland deriving

>from the vulnerability of our ports, our nuclear facilities, our

chemical facilities, etc?

Fair-minded analysts would have to go back all the way back to
President Johnson and the Tonkin Gulf resolution to find a Democrat
who pursued a national security strategy that was simultaneously so
secretive, misguided, and counter-productive to the nation's national
security interests. And yet it is Democrats, rather than Republicans,
who are almost universally deemed in the context of mainstream debate
to have a "credibility" problem with national security.

A perfect example of this assumption at work can be found in an
otherwise thoughtful treatment of the topic by the journalist James
Traub in a New York Times Magazine cover story last Sunday, entitled
"The Things They Carry." Traub respectfully quotes Condoleezza Rice,

>from an essay that appeared in Foreign Affairs. Below is the full

quote as it then appeared: 

"Yet many in the United States are (and have always been)
uncomfortable with the notions of power politics, great powers, and
power balances. In an extreme form, this discomfort leads to a
reflexive appeal instead to notions of international law and norms,
and the belief that the support of many states or even better, of
institutions like the United Nations - is essential to the legitimate
exercise of power. The 'national interest' is replaced with
'humanitarian interests' or the interests of 'the international
community.' The belief that the United States is exercising power
legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or
something else was deeply rooted in Wilsonian thought, and there are
strong echoes of it in the Clinton administration."

Traub's article takes the above to represent a sober-minded statement
of traditional foreign policy realism. In fact, when carefully
scrutinized, Rice's distinction crumbles to dust. As Slate.com's
Robert Wright pointed out in examining this very paragraph "in drawing
this one-dimensional spectrum - national interest at one end and
humanitarianism/multilateralism at the other - Rice is conflating two
separate questions: 1) When should you act for humanitarian reasons as
opposed to reasons of national self interest, and 2) When should you
act multilaterally as opposed to unilaterally? "There is no necessary
connection between the two," he notes, "a fact illustrated by Rice's
former boss, the first President Bush. He justified the Persian Gulf
War in terms of strict national interest - oil, jobs - but he fought
it under U.N. auspices and with the help of troops from other
nations." 

In other words, Rice's formulation tells us nothing about when to use
force; when to do so unilaterally or multilaterally; and when to hold
back. Nevermind. She is a Republican conservative and so she is deemed
to be "credible" on national security regardless of whether she makes
any sense. 

Traub contrasts Rice's alleged common sense with what we are to
understand to be the Democrats' namby-pamby foreign policy idealism,
noting that the "discomfort" Rice professes to observe, "is, in turn,
the residuum of Vietnam." Traub, moreover, endorses Rice's accusation.
"There's some truth to that claim," he writes. "One Democratic policy
figure I spoke to said, 'If you listen to the Democrats in Iowa, you
sometimes get the impression that the U.N. is going to save us from
the situation.'" 

Any number of inconsistencies can be found in the above, but for
starters, because the "Democratic policy figure" is unnamed, it is
impossible to determine whether he or she is someone whose judgment
readers need take seriously. The phrase "you sometimes get the
impression" is designed to distance the statement from the need for
any evidence. Did any of the major Democratic candidates actually put
forth a policy that can accurate be described in these terms? No, but
so what? An anonymously quoted individual claims to have an
"impression" and that's good enough. 

Traub continues in this regard, explaining, for instance, that even
though "it remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact,
spend the Soviets into the ground," and many scholars of the late
Soviet Union would vehemently disagree, "the G.O.P. emerged from that
era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of
fecklessness - a status brought home in the most mortifying possible
manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank
wearing a tanker's helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying
Squirrel." 

Yes, we all know it happens all the time in the purposefully inane
world of cable TV, talk radio and much of what passes for debate in
the contemporary punditocracy, but how is it possible, in a serious
analysis of which party is thought to be more credible on the issue of
national security, that a 15-year-old photograph of Michael Dukakis
could be made to represent the Democrats' position? Franklin D.
Roosevelt was paralyzed with polio and would have looked even more
ridiculous trying to fit into a tank. Does that prove anything? More
seriously, what of the war in Kosovo? What of the party 's commitment
to curb global warming? What of the distinguished records of service
in the area of foreign policy by people like What of the distinguished
records of service in the area of foreign policy by people such as
Madeline Albright, Sandy Berger, Joe Biden, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Warren Christopher, Wesley Clark, Chris Dodd, Richard Holbrook, Bob
Kerrey, Anthony Lake and William Perry. What about the body of foreign
policy experts among non-neocon scholars who almost unanimously
endorse the Democrats' multilateralist vision over that of the Bush
administration's unstable combination of isolationism and imperialism?
What, in other words, about questions of substance?

Citing the neoconservative analyst Robert Kagan, Traub concludes,
"Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to
the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions
like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the
clutch." But again, where is the evidence for this contention? Is it
not just as likely that Europeans take a different attitude toward
terrorism than that which Traub attributes to Americans because they
have more experience dealing with it on their own soil? But as Spanish
journalist Miguel Angel Aguilar, who helped found El Pams and now runs
the Association for European Journalists in Madrid, explained to me in
an interview, Europeans have learned that terrorists can be an enemy
"against which sheer military might is not going to help you." Spain,
he notes, has fought a home-grown terrorist movement for 30 years.
"Using the army turned out to be a disaster," Aguilar observes. "We
were trying to kill mosquitoes with bombs. Innocents were killed and
democracy suffered and we were no safer."

To turn Traub's formulation on its (proper) head, is it not the Bush
administration's impatience with a working multilateral solution to
the problem of containing Iraq that "failed" America in the clutch?
Are we not paying for that failure every day not only with hundreds of
billions of dollars (and few genuine allies) but also with the lives
of hundreds of brave men and women? Bush claimed to be protecting the
nation from "terrorism" but launched a war against a nation that,
according to his own CIA, played no role in any anti-American
terrorism for more than a decade. In the meantime, we are, as I write
this, on Orange alert and Osama bin Laden - the man who launched these
horrific attacks - continues to mock us with his reconstituted
minions. And yet even in the media's most thoughtful and prestigious
publications, reporters insist that it is the Democrats, rather than
Bush, who must demonstrate their "credibility" on matters of national
security.

The mind reels as the heart sinks...
______________
fwd//Starman

40-year Story of US's Support for Saddam-- Well Documented

With a soundtrack by Frank Sinatra, Flash videographer Eric Blumrich
tells the 40-year story of US support for Saddam, starting around 1959
in Egypt. Every journalist in the US should study the history of
Saddam's rise to power. This flash presentation includes a great many
very surprising but well-documented facts that have essentially be
swept down the mainstream media memory hole.
http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html