Senator Byrd's Speech 3-13-03

Thanks, Bob*. That was an excellent speech that raises several good questions as well as giving us a lot of information to ponder. A good read!

(I hope, if anyone discusses it, that it doesn't descend into a tirade about Byrd's past. That has no relevance to what he said, imo.)

 

Bush's inflated sense of supremacy
By George Soros
Published: March 12 2003 20:02 | Last Updated: March 12 2003 20:02


With US and British troops poised to invade Iraq, the rest of the world is overwhelmingly opposed. Yet Saddam Hussein is generally seen as a tyrant who must be disarmed and the United Nations Security Council has unanimously demanded that he disclose and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. What has gone wrong?


Iraq is the first instance in which the Bush doctrine is being applied and it is provoking an allergic reaction. The doctrine is built on two pillars: first, the US will do everything in its power to maintain unquestioned military supremacy; second, it arrogates the right to pre-emptive action. These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties; and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

The Bush doctrine is grounded in the belief that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are decorations. This belief is not entirely false but it exaggerates one aspect of reality - military power - at the exclusion of others.

I see a parallel between the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences.

This course of events seems inexorable but a boom-bust process can be aborted at any stage and few of them reach the extremes of the recent stock market bubble. The sooner the process is aborted, the better. This is how I view the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy.

President George W. Bush came into office with a coherent strategy based on market fundamentalism and military power. But before September 11 2001 he lacked a clear mandate or a well defined enemy. The terrorist attack changed all that. Terrorism is the ideal enemy. It is invisible and therefore never disappears. An enemy that poses a genuine and recognised threat can effectively hold a nation together. That is particularly useful when the prevailing ideology is based on the unabashed pursuit of self- interest. Mr Bush's administration deliberately fosters fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president. We have come a long way from Franklin D. Roosevelt's dictum that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But the war on terrorism cannot be accepted as the guiding principle of US foreign policy. What will happen to the world if the most powerful country on earth is solely preoccupied with self-preservation?

The Bush policies have already caused severe unintended adverse consequences. The Atlantic Alliance is in a shambles and the European Union divided. The US is a fearful giant throwing its weight around. Afghanistan has been liberated but law and order have not been established beyond Kabul. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers. Beyond Iraq, an even more dangerous threat looms in North Korea.

The global economy is in recession, stocks are in a bear market and the dollar is in decline. In the US, there has been a dramatic shift from budget surplus to deficit. It is difficult to find a time when political and economic conditions have deteriorated as rapidly.

The game is not yet over. A rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could cause a dramatic reversal. The price of oil could fall; the stock market could celebrate; consumers could overcome their anxieties and resume spending; and business could respond by stepping up capital expenditure. America would end its dependency on Saudi Arabian oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations with North Korea could be started without a loss of face. This is what Mr Bush is counting on.

Military victory in Iraq would be the easy part. It is what follows that should give us pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception that has given rise to it. That could happen here.

It is not too late to prevent the boom-bust process from getting out of hand. The Security Council could allow more time for weapons inspections. Military presence in the region could be reduced - and bolstered if Iraq balks. An invasion could be mounted at summer's end. The UN would score a victory. That is what the French propose and the British could still make it happen. But the chances are slim; Mr Bush has practically declared war.

Let us hope that if there is war, it will be swift and claim few lives. Removing Mr Hussein is a good thing, yet the way Mr Bush is going about it must be condemned. America must play a more constructive role if humanity is to make any progress.

 

I don't think Byrd's vision of reconstructing Iraq is unrealistic at all. If anything, he may sugar coat it. I think a US interim government, given current sentiments in the Middle East, will be even less popular there than the Brits were as colonialists. Even if we makes things better for the average citizen, gratitude may not be flowing. I really hope I'm just being too cynical.

 

I have been against the war as I think there are other ways of dealing with the problems of Iraq, Israel and the rest of the Middle East than this war which I feel is unnecessary and immoral. However,it is sobering to think that it could cost as much as S48 billion to rebuild and occupy Iraq and their peak oil production is only 16 billion per year.

Combined with the stock market collspse and the growing deficit, a politician who wants to take the easy way out by pretending the war's costs is negligible, I think that we may see a post Vietnam War syndrome of stagflation again. That was no fun at all and led to a great malaise in the US as our standard of living showed no improvement for about 20 years.

 

As far as reconstruction cost goes, no one has mentioned that a post-Saddam post-sanctions Iraq will have access to a substantial amount of international capital, through both "public" institutions like the IMF and through private means. Iraq will be a good investment, and the $$$ will be there, especially 2-4 years down the road once the country is stable & a new form of government is taking shape. As for the democratization process, here's a pretty good article, I'm not quite as optimistic, but I think it's the best chance we have at making positive, lasting changes in the Middle East.

Democracy by America
by Daniel W. Drezner
Post date 03.12.03
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=drezner031203

It didn't take long for skeptics to dismiss George W. Bush's pledge to democratize a postwar Iraq. Antiwar activists saw the pledge as a transparent excuse for warmongering. And democracy advocates harshly, and justifiably--criticized the State Department for scotching plans for a postwar federal government in favor of a centralized regime.

But perhaps the most troubling criticism came from historians and area experts, who trained their sights on the neoconservative argument that Iraq can be the start of a larger wave of democratization across the Middle East. MIT historian John W. Dower has blasted the notion that an American occupation of Iraq would produce the same results as the 1945-1952 occupation of Japan. He argues that Japan's unconditional surrender and competent bureaucracy created uniquely favorable conditions for occupation, and that Japan's relatively homogeneous population helped it avoid "the religious, ethnic, regional and tribal animosities that are likely to erupt in a post-war Iraq." Edward Said, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies, has lectured neocons that no U.S. plan for democratization "sufficiently address[es] the country's seething internal factionalism and ethno-religious dynamic, particularly after 30 debilitating years under the Baath Party, U.N. sanctions, and two major wars."

It's not surprising that these experts would be so critical. Historians and area specialists traffic in the particular rather than the general; they have professional incentives to promote that line of discourse. On top of that, it is intellectually fashionable these days to believe that local conditions always triumph over grand theory. But the local conditions argument overlooks a crucial detail: Over the past century, international factors have been more important than domestic factors in determining the success of democratic transition and consolidation. And the international factors surrounding Iraq are more favorable than one might think.

Current perceptions of how regimes democratize have largely been shaped by what Samuel Huntington has labeled the "third wave" of democratization, during which states--in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim--democratized through the internal overthrow of autocratic regimes.

But these perceptions aren't completely reliable. For one thing, they overlook the fact that external military force contributed to third-wave developments in Haiti, Panama, and the Balkans. More importantly, though, they ignore the main force behind Huntington's "second wave" of democratization (1943-1962): U.S. military occupation. Allied occupation contributed to a successful democratic transition not only in Japan, but in France, Italy, Austria, and West Germany; it pushed Greece, the Philippines, and South Korea toward democratization as well. As Notre Dame political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell, writing with European University Institute scholar Philippe Schmitter, concluded in 1986, "[T]he most frequent context within which a transition from authoritarian rule has begun in recent decades has been military defeat in an international conflict. Moreover, the factor which most probabilistically assured a democratic outcome was occupation by a foreign power which was itself a political democracy [emphasis added]."

Skeptics will cite Afghanistan and point out that military occupation alone hardly guarantees a full democratic transition. That analysis may be right as far as it goes, but it fails to address the question of why democratization tends to occur in waves. The answer is that there's another mechanism through which external forces matter: proximity to neighboring market democracies. Political scientists Jeffrey Kopstein and David Reilly, of the University of Toronto and Niagra University, point out in their examination of the economic and political freedoms in the post-communist world that the former communist countries currently enjoying the greatest freedoms were geographically closest to the Soviet Union's noncommunist perimeter. The authors conclude, "This suggests the spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms, resources, and institutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and market economies in the postcommunist [sic] era." In other words, the closer you are to liberal democracies, the easier it is for you to become a liberal democracy.

This would seem to be of little relevance in the Middle East, a region not exactly overrun by Jeffersonian democrats. But while it's true that Iraq borders Syria and Saudi Arabia--two of the more repressive regimes on the planet--it's also true that a healthy fraction of Iraq's neighbors have built or are building democratic institutions. To Iraq's north lies Turkey, a stable, liberal, and secular Muslim democracy whose government is furiously trying to adopt Western human rights norms as part of its bid for European Union membership. Iraq's eastern border is with Iran, a country that may not be liberal, but has been a practicing electoral democracy for two decades. More importantly, the majority of Iran's population wants further democratization and liberalization and has emphasized this point through routine mass protests. To Iraq's west lies Jordan, which the 2000 edition of the authoritative Freedom House country rankings named the most liberal Arab state (admittedly a dubious honor).

And, of course, there's the example of Northern Iraq, a predominantly Kurdish region in which two different parties--the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)--administer separate parcels of territory. By the standards of the Middle East, these areas are freely and fairly governed. As Human Rights Watch reported in September 2002, "Both the KDP and PUK administrations promulgated laws and adopted decisions aimed at the protection of fundamental civil and political rights, including freedom of expression and of association."

The area specialists aren't necessarily wrong; democratizing Iraq won't be easy. But the conditions aren't nearly as barren as these experts suggest, and the potential upside is enormous. If a democratic transition were to succeed in Iraq, then Syria, suddenly surrounded by established democracies (Israel and Turkey) and emerging democracies (Iraq and Jordan), might start to feel nervous as well. Combine democratization in the Fertile Crescent with the continued liberalization of Morocco, Bahrain, and Qatar, and suddenly the neocon vision of a fourth wave of democratization spreading across the Middle East begins to look plausible.

Daniel W. Drezner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of The Sanctions Paradox (Cambridge 1999). He writes regularly at drezner.blogspot.com.

 

You are not being too cynical imo.
Considering how bad the economy is at home, and how many state and federal agencies are in the red...why in hell would we want to take on something that costs so much. It is money we neither have nor need to spend on a country that has little effect on how we live.
This just gives me another reason to lean towards being against Dubya's War.

Deckard is totally right....this was a quality speech with good points to ponder.....the man's historical viewpoints don't/shouldn't detract from the message.


Thanks for the post Finn...appreciate it.

 

LA Times story on a State Department paper regarding potential for Democracy in Iraq and the ME.
________________
Democracy Domino Theory 'Not Credible'
A State Department report disputes Bush's claim that ousting Hussein will spur reforms in the Mideast, intelligence officials say.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- A classified State Department report expresses doubt that installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a claim President Bush has made in trying to build support for a war, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report exposes significant divisions within the Bush administration over the so-called democratic domino theory, one of the arguments that underpins the case for invading Iraq.

The report, which has been distributed to a small group of top government officials but not publicly disclosed, says that daunting economic and social problems are likely to undermine basic stability in the region for years, let alone prospects for democratic reform.

Even if some version of democracy took root — an event the report casts as unlikely — anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.

"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," says one passage of the report, according to an intelligence official who agreed to read portions of it to The Times.

"Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements."

The thrust of the document, the source said, "is that this idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."

Even the document's title appears to dismiss the administration argument. The report is labeled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes."

The report was produced by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the in-house analytical arm.

State Department officials declined to comment on the report. Intelligence officials said the report does not necessarily reflect the views of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or other senior State Department officials.

Daunting Challenges

The obstacles to reform outlined in the report are daunting.

"Middle East societies are riven" by political, economic and social problems that are likely to undermine stability "regardless of the nature of any externally influenced or spontaneous, indigenous change," the report said, according to the source.

The report is dated Feb. 26, officials said, the same day Bush endorsed the domino theory in a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

It's not clear whether the president has seen the report, but such documents are typically distributed to top national security officials.

"A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," Bush said.

Other top administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have made similar remarks in recent months.

But the argument has been pushed hardest by a group of officials and advisors who have been the leading proponents of going to war with Iraq. Prominent among them are Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory panel.

Wolfowitz has said that Iraq could be "the first Arab democracy" and that even modest democratic progress in Iraq would "cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran but across the whole Arab world."

Similarly, Perle has said that a reformed Iraq "has the potential to transform the thinking of people around the world about the potential for democracy, even in Arab countries where people have been disparaging of their potential."

White House officials hold out the promise of a friendly and functional government in Baghdad to contrast with administration portrayals of President Saddam Hussein's regime as brutal and bent on building his stock of biological and chemical weapons.

The domino theory also is used by the administration as a counterargument to critics in Congress and elsewhere who have expressed concern that invading Iraq will inflame the Muslim world and fuel terrorist activity against the United States.

But the theory is disputed by many Middle East experts and is viewed with skepticism by analysts at the CIA and the State Department, intelligence officials said.

Divisions in Iraq

Critics say even establishing a democratic government in Iraq will be extremely difficult. Iraq is made up of ethnic groups deeply hostile to one another. Ever since its inception in 1932, the country has known little but bloody coups and brutal dictators.

Even so, it is seen by some as holding more democratic potential — because of its wealth and educated population — than many of its neighbors.

By some estimates, 65 million adults in the Middle East can't read or write, and 14 million are unemployed, with an exploding, poorly educated youth population.

Given such trends, "we'll be lucky to have strong central governments [in the Middle East], let alone democracy," said one intelligence official with extensive experience in the region.

The official stressed that no one in intelligence or diplomatic circles opposes the idea of trying to install a democratic government in Iraq.

"It couldn't hurt," the official said. "But to sell [the war] on the basis that this is going to cause 1,000 flowers to bloom is naive."

Some officials said the classified document reflects views that are widely held in the State Department and CIA but that those holding such views have been muzzled in an administration eager to downplay the costs and risks of war.

One intelligence official said the CIA has not been asked to produce its own analysis on the domino question.

CIA Assessment

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, CIA Director George J. Tenet offered a modest assessment of the prospects that overthrowing Hussein could prompt a wave of reform.

"I don't want to be expansive in, you know, a big domino theory about what happens in the rest of the Arab world," Tenet said. "But an Iraq whose territorial integrity has been maintained, that's up and running and functioning ... may actually have some salutary impact across the region."

The State Department report cites "high levels of corruption, serious infrastructure degradation, overpopulation" and other forces causing widespread disenfranchisement in the region.

The report concludes that "political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time."

Middle East experts said there are other factors working against democratic reform, including a culture that values community and to some extent conformity over individual rights.

"I don't accept the view that the fall of Saddam Hussein is going to prompt quick or even discernible movement toward democratization of the Arab states," said Philip C. Wilcox, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former top State Department official. "Those countries are held back not by the presence of vicious authoritarian regimes in Baghdad but by a lot of other reasons."

Bush has responded to such assessments by assailing the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

In pushing for democracy in the Middle East, he is departing somewhat from a long track record of U.S. presidents — focused on preserving stability, economic ties, and access to Middle East oil — backing autocratic regimes.

Still, the Bush White House has been selective in applying pressure for reform, favoring longtime U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

 

Buck,

Thanks for the article. I agree with his point that military occupation and neighboring democracies willl have a large effect on the success of "democratizing" Iraq. However, I disagree with his belief that these will outweigh local factors. I believe the Middle East is much more comparable to Africa, where the democratization process is not going as well due to conflicts between warring ethnicities. Furthermore, the article assumes that democracy and stability are one and the same. While democracy does foster stability, this can be overridden by local ethnic tensions (see the Balkans or the Phillipines).

 

From across the pond...
____________
Thousands Of U.S. fatalities expected in Iraq

By: Philip Knight March 12, 2003

Experts say likelihood of urban combat and exposure to WMD will result in "many thousands" of U.S. military dead.
Low casualty rates in the Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan have led Americans to expect more of the same in Iraq.
Yet military experts are quietly warning that the impending war will likely yield a high U.S. death toll.
Analysts suggest that the Bush administration is keeping silent on the issue of casualties for fear of weakening public support for the war.
"I don't think the American public is prepared for the kinds of casualties that might occur in Iraq," said NBC military analyst Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.).
A consensus appears to be emerging that U.S. deaths during an operation in Iraq will likely run into the thousands.
The two concerns most often cited to account for significant U.S. fatality rates are the likelihood of urban combat and of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical and biological weapons.
"If you want to get a regime to change, you have to go to Baghdad and the casualties are going to be great" said P. Terrence Hopmann, director of the Watson Institute's Global Security Program.
One senior military official confided, "if we have to fight a pitched battle in Baghdad, it means we screwed up somewhere along the way."
Yet the latest intelligence seems to indicate that this nightmare scenario is the one U.S. troops will be encountering.
Hussein is reportedly transforming Baghdad into an "Alamo-like" last stand, and guns and rocket propelled grenades are being issued to the population.
U.S. intelligence has detected a substantial concentration of forces around Baghdad "with the deliberate intention of creating an urban combat environment," according to a Pentagon official.
Four of Iraq's six Republican Guard divisions are now concentrated in Baghdad.
General Joseph Hoar, the former commander in chief of the military's central command, remarked "all our advantages of command and control, technology, mobility, all of those things are in part given up [in cities]."
The most comparable example of a modern urban war is the Russian offensive against Grozny. In 1994, 1,200 poorly-equipped Chechen rebels held the city against a Russian army of 30,000, resulting in many thousands of Russian dead.
Whereas Grozny was comprised of a few hundred thousand people, Baghdad is a city of 5 million.
The administration's expectation of low casualty figures is largely based on the hope that Hussein's government will quickly implode in the face of a U.S. attack.
"The secret within the not-so-secret plan is that the top decision-makers are hoping that Hussein's regime will collapse," writes The Washington Post's Ralph Peters. "But wise soldiers don't go to war with hope as their primary weapon" (11/15/02).
"It is always possible that the Iraqi military will refuse to fight for Hussein," notes Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, "but this is wishful thinking . . . It is far more likely that they will fight, and tenaciously" (Los Angeles Times, 8/30/02).
The complex web of tribal relationships and loyalties hold the key to understanding the resistance U.S. troops are likely to encounter in Iraq.
Unlike most of the Shia or Kurdish conscripts who deserted or surrendered during the Gulf War, the Republican Guard, as well as most of Baghdad's population, is comprised of Hussein's own Sunni Arab tribe -- which by all accounts remains fiercely loyal to his regime.
Military analyst Gwynne Dyer noted that the only reason Hussein survived the Shia and Kurdish revolts after the Gulf War is because the Sunnis "closed ranks around Saddam Hussein and fought to defend his regime."
More troublingly, according to London's Observer, the Pentagon believes that "they will have 48 hours to find and kill or capture Saddam before he tries to deploy any nuclear, biological or major conventional weapons he may have" (7/14/02). Intelligence sources have already intercepted Iraqi communications authorizing field commanders to use weapons of mass destruction.
While some analysts have cited less than a thousand U.S. combat fatalities, an emerging consensus of military experts appear to be warning of substantially higher casualty rates given the likelihood of urban combat and troop exposure to chemical or biological toxins.
The National Security Advisor report to the president advised "if Saddam Hussein retaliates conventionally, estimates of U.S. casualties range from the dozens to tens of thousands."
According to his discussions with a number of military experts, former senator Gary Hart warned that if the Iraqis mount a resistance in the major cities, American casualties could easily reach 50,000 to 100,000.
Military analysts such as Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.) warn of the potentiality of casualties in the "many, many thousands, depending upon what kind of war we fight and what kind of weapons are unleashed on our soldiers."
Likewise, Michael O'Hanlan, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution, estimated that "the United States could possibly lose as many as 5,000 troops if the Republican Guard fights as hard and as effectively as its size and weaponry would plausibly allow."
Philip Knight is a foreign news analyst and columnist with Knight Syndicate.com based in New York City.

©Manchester Times 2003

 

Scary stuff...