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Post by hartlikeawheel on Dec 7, 2006 10:41:08 GMT -5
Laffin' out loud, _E_
Heard about it on the radio this am.
Just shows how low we have stooped when that is fodder for our interest.
Go read about my underwear. Hee.
Winking at you because your political opinions mean less to me than the fact that you seem to be a good Dad and Grandpa!
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Post by liriodendron on Dec 7, 2006 12:22:38 GMT -5
As the Dixie Chicks sing in one of their new songs, they paid the price and they're ready to keep on paying. With all of the sell outs on this planet, I find that attitude refreshing. This song speaks to me and the message I am hearing has nothing whatsoever to do with war or politics or our president.
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rmn
![](http://emoticons4u.com/dressed/bek038.gif) Sleepy Member
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Posts: 75
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Post by rmn on Dec 7, 2006 12:37:20 GMT -5
Re: What to do about the war. « Reply #105 by Gailkate on Yesterday at 11:35pm »
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- //It didn't have to be this way.//
//Can you elaborate, RMN?//
Yes, of course. Though not now, as work is biting me in the butt.
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Post by scotbrit on Dec 7, 2006 16:42:49 GMT -5
You can't get away with that, JoeW - although it was posted some time ago, without someone commenting. As no-one else has commented, I assume they are just politely ignoring you or have given up on you. I break my silence (Yes! I know, again) but what you are saying is total and utter rubbish. I may have mentioned this before! I had about 35 guests here in Maidenhead in June from all over the world who had been former members of the cult from which we all escaped. Here are the thoughts of one of them. I have met this guy four or five times now. And I am meeting him again in a couple of weeks time when he passes through London on his way to another lecture in Amsterdam. www.dailycolonial.com/go.dc?p=3&s=3427my.gwu.edu/mod/news/view.cfm?ANN_ID=24331
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 16:46:08 GMT -5
Thanks for posting the links, scotbrit. I'll try to figure out what post of mine they refer to. If you wish to you can tell me (just hit "quote" above the offending reply, and then post that as your reply).
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 16:49:55 GMT -5
Meanwhile, I'll say that on a quick overview, they seem to make a fair point about the shortsightedness of American politics. Prof. Caws does not, at first glance, appear to attempt to support his opinion about Iraq, but since Iraq does not appear to have been his principal focus, that is understandable.
I'll reread the pieces more carefully.
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Post by scotbrit on Dec 7, 2006 16:55:40 GMT -5
Reply #29 on Oct 21, 2006, 11:41am
In re-reading Professor Caws remarks, LISTEN to what he is saying.
He is NOT talking about one particular war.
He is talking about the imbecility of the current administration which you seem to support.
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 17:23:20 GMT -5
The pieces are not polemics, and they deserve some reflection before I reply.
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Post by gailkate on Dec 7, 2006 17:35:14 GMT -5
So that's how you all have been getting those quote boxes! Poor me, I always was guilty of skipping over half the stuff on the page.
Anyway, Joe has a point about whatever post he made that you're not going to let him get away with, Brit. Copy it or something, but don't make him defend everything he's said for heaven knows how long. Was it in this forum? Old CB? Older than dirt CB?
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 18:19:07 GMT -5
gailkate — thanks for supporting my request. As it happens, Brit gave the reference, but not in a quote box. He said he was referring to my post #29 to this thread.
Another hint about quoting: you can also delete portions of a quote to which you don't want to respond. Once you have hit the "quote" button, you get a reply screen in which the post you quoted is inserted, beginning with the word quote between brackets and ending with /quote between brackets. Don't delete those openers and closers, but you can delete anything between them as if you had put it there yourself. (I like to show that I've done it by putting ellipsis marks where the deleted material was.) When you post your own reply, the quote box shows up as part of your reply.
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Post by gailkate on Dec 7, 2006 19:18:42 GMT -5
gailkate — thanks for supporting my request. As it happens, Brit gave the reference, but not in a quote box. He said he was referring to my post #29 to this thread. Another hint about quoting: you can also delete portions of a quote to which you don't want to respond. Once you have hit the "quote" button, you get a reply screen in which the post you quoted is inserted, beginning with the word quote between brackets and ending with /quote between brackets. ...(I like to show that I've done it by putting ellipsis marks where the deleted material was.) When you post your own reply, the quote box shows up as part of your reply. Like this! I am so proud of myself.
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Post by juliastar on Dec 7, 2006 19:36:18 GMT -5
She's unstoppable now!
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 7, 2006 20:39:16 GMT -5
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 21:33:35 GMT -5
… Like this! I am so proud of myself.You seem so happy, I exalt you.
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 21:55:02 GMT -5
But it's a Democrat who wants a draft. What has this guy been smoking to make him think it makes any sense to talk about Republicans reinstituting the draft? OTOH he has no suggestions of his own. I guess it's supposed to be a good article because he sounds very angry. Or is he really satirizing the far left? In other words, unlike the pieces brit linked, this one comes across to me as somewhat polemical.
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 7, 2006 23:36:26 GMT -5
The occupation phase of Iraq was totally predictable. In fact, I did sometime ago back at the old PHC site. There was no historical foundation for the Administration's actions and policies. Get rid of a bad guy and then what?
Once again, Iraq is a construct of post WW1 Great Britain. Its border were drawn without any consideration as to who actually lived there. Like Yugoslavia, the only way to govern was with a Strong Man dictatorship. Now that's gone, maybe for the best. But now there are three different contenders for running the place, none of whom like one another, making for a Civil War with our men and women in the middle of a mess not of their making and for a mission with objectives that were never achievable. Utter nonesense, and when the neo-cons get caught out, all they can do is spin and twist. What the Iraq Study Group didn't do was to assess the assinine decision making that went into getting us all into this mess.
Polemic? Sure. That doesn't make any less true.
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Post by joew on Dec 7, 2006 23:52:13 GMT -5
Excellent job of editing the polemic rhetoric out and boiling it down to the substance, dand.
The thing is, though, that the Baker-Hamilton Commission was not supposed "to assess the assinine decision making that went into getting us all into this mess." It was supposed to suggest where we go from here, which it did, and your guy didn't.
Pointing fingers can be worthwhile as a political activity, and figuring out what went wrong in the decision-making can be helpful when similar situations arise in the future; but neither really helps us get out of the mess.
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 7, 2006 23:56:47 GMT -5
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 8, 2006 0:00:08 GMT -5
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 8, 2006 0:07:29 GMT -5
The only viable political solution, IMHO, is to seperate Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions of Kurds, Sh'ites and Sunnis, each with access to the wealth of oil, and let them run the place as best as possible. And get out. Staying any much longer is more fuel for more tragedy, for the Iraqis and for us.
Our adventure has had only bad results. This midadventure has encouraged our real enemies to do more evil. They have been emboldened and made stronger. We have to do better if we want some security in our lives.
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Post by joew on Dec 8, 2006 0:15:08 GMT -5
Both of the articles you link make good sense, as far as they go.
Of course, 1998 was not 2003. When we finally got around to removing Saddam, the 9/11/2001 attack had galvanized radical Muslims, giving them a hope of hurting the U.S. which probably was not there previously. So if Clinton had taken the advice at the time it was given, the results may well have been very different, because we would not have appeared so vulnerable.
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Post by gailkate on Dec 8, 2006 0:19:39 GMT -5
Thanks for the memories.... ![:P](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/tongue.png) What the neocon credo boiled down to was "we're the big guys and we'll take what we want." Leadership means the exercise of power and "interests" mean free access to any goodies we want, in particular, oil. I think the Hofstra prof's point (sorry, too lazy to look up his name) is that there is not going to be a good outcome. He's saying baldly and alarmingly that it's too damn late. I'm afraid I agree. I'd love to see some brilliant diplomats waiting in the wings, ready to cajole, bribe or bully the whole bunch of them into a peaceful rapprochement, but who will lead that initiative? Who among the Bush coterie is even remotely savvy and nimble enough to do it? When he needed help he turned to his dad's old guard. They came up with what I'm very much afraid is pap. All they've really done is prevent still more troops being sent to Iraq (a la McCain) and confirm what most of us have known for a very long time. He's right that China must be laughing. And if Bin Laden is still alive, he's got to be feeling very smug indeed.
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Post by SeattleDan on Dec 8, 2006 0:52:09 GMT -5
They make sense if you you want to promote a hegemonic model of American policy on the rest of the world...a world which will resent such a model, and, if implemented, will cause a radical backlash that was never intended...witness, Latin America now and Iraq.
As to the last post, it seems to be the "Blame Clinton" meme that has such tired resononance, that I know you know better.
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Post by hartlikeawheel on Dec 8, 2006 1:48:22 GMT -5
May I please have a karma point for prognostication?
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Post by ptcaffey on Dec 8, 2006 3:21:22 GMT -5
//Joe: So if Clinton had taken the advice at the time it was given, the results may well have been very different, because we would not have appeared so vulnerable.//
President Clinton did sign the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act as well as the the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act (1999), which made available funds to the Iraqi democratic opposition. He did not, from the height of a blue sky, order a "pre-emptive" invasion, but then he was in no position to do so. Who, realistically speaking, could have removed Saddam (with hundreds of thousands of American troops waiting in the sands nearby)? Here are their names:
Cheney Powell Bush
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Post by juliastar on Dec 8, 2006 5:56:38 GMT -5
On some level, you are right, joe, the piece Dan cites is a lot of angry rhetoric, much of which has already been stated in a thousand places but as a loyal conservative, I think you need to assess just how angry a lot of people who usually don't get angry are and stop chalking it up to fringe thinking. I have a client who is Republican and I don't discuss politics with him unless he brings it up and then I don't mince words but he has always smugly held his ground. He called yesterday. After we got done with the business discussion, he said, quietly, "how did you like the last elections?" I said that all I really felt was immense relief, a sense that things would turn around and some sense of balance and perspective would be restored. "Me, too," he said, and then astonishingly launched his own tirade on how the neocons had trashed everything he thought his own party stood for with disastrous consequences. Given our history, I thought that was tremendously big of him to say to me. If we can agree that the emperor has no clothes, maybe we can chart a what to do about it course that might not be anybody's first choice but can be something we can live with. This is what grabbed me in the article Dan cited: Let’s not kid ourselves about how bad this can get. The chances of Humpty-Dumpty ever going back together are minimal at this point. While the embarrassingly ever-obsequious American media debates whether or not to call this a civil war, precisely that rages across Baghdad with white-hot intensity. Or perhaps even worse. What was once a civil war is now increasingly looking like pure, unorganized, chaotic human violence, the stuff of post-apocalyptic science fiction. Now, the factions have factions, the reprisals have reprisals, the second cousins avenge the grand-nephews, the violence is increasingly random, and the flavor is of a national-scale Clockwork Orange, turned up to eleven.
Iraq was always an improbable state, just as was Yugoslavia. Both survived for the same reason – an iron-fisted strongman who wielded unvarnished brutality to impose the will of the state – and both predictably fell to pieces when that top-down unifying force was removed. If only George Bush had thought a bit about that before committing other people’s sons and daughters to his great folly. But that would have meant actually doing the "hard work" he repeatedly referenced in his 2004 debates with John Kerry, as he was all the while apparently avoiding exactly the same with equal intensity, whenever out of the public eye. No wonder Jim Webb admitted to wanting to detach this guy’s head from his body at their White House meeting last week. Could you imagine having your son in harm’s way in Iraq, sent there by a guy who only found out that the Muslim community is divided into Shia and Sunnis two months before the invasion began, and months after he had in fact already ordered it to go forward? In my book, the mystery isn’t why Webb nearly exploded, but rather why that hasn’t been happening every day of the week for three years now.
In any case, what’s much more probable than Iraq’s best-case scenario of unbelievable tragedy and waste, only to end up about where we started (minus one or two shattered lives), is something far more grievous than even that. Iraq is already in deep into civil war, and even if the violence could be stopped today, the damage to social capital is immense, and very likely far too widespread to ever again contemplate even some sort of federalist power-sharing arrangement within a unitary polity. That’s a fancy way of saying that too many people hate too many other people to imagine them ever trusting each other enough to cooperatively govern a single country. In a region where political affinities and identities are tribal and familial, and where even the perception of insult according to often-Byzantine honor codes must be avenged with death in order for a man to be a man, it borders on the inconceivable that there could ever be an Iraq again, except by means of terrible repression in the hands of some Saddam-like Shiite junta, and perhaps not even then.
More likely is that the civil war rages on, gets a lot worse, then gets a lot worse again by dragging in surrounding states like Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then perhaps gets even worse yet by inflaming the region sufficiently to diminish the flow of oil to, and therefore also the economies of, those parts of the world which depend on the black heroin, which nowadays means just about everybody outside of Myanmar and Bhutan. About the only thing ‘good’ you can say concerning this crisis is that, in our (rapidly-fading) unipolar moment, it is unlikely to suck in a gaggle of adversarial big dogs into a great power war, a la Sarajevo in 1914, but even that can’t be guaranteed. Everybody’s got interests at play in those latitudes.
I’m not predicting the dire outcome of a regionalized civil war at this point, but I would say it is a more likely bet than the best-case scenario described above, which is of course itself hardly any picnic. Let’s not forget just how not-good that best-case scenario is, and how incredibly costly it would be as well – politically, morally, fiscally and strategically. The Chinese must be laughing their heads off, standing by and waiting their turn while today’s hegemon is kind enough to do the work of imploding for them, rolling out the red carpet for China’s ascendance as the next Masters of the Universe.And as gail said so well, I'd love to see some brilliant diplomats waiting in the wings, ready to cajole, bribe or bully the whole bunch of them into a peaceful rapprochement, but who will lead that initiative?Who among the Bush coterie is even remotely savvy and nimble enough to do it? That, right there, is terrifying. If they were up to it, it would have been done by now. As Professor Green observes, the mission in Iraq "could hardly have been more ineptly executed if Michael Brown himself had been presiding over it." Read some of the stuff in the report like huge percentages of the people sent to implement in Iraq not speaking Arabic, applying for passports for the first time and being asked what their view on Roe v. Wade was. If I made this up and stuck it in a piece of fiction it wouldn't be believable.
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Post by joew on Dec 8, 2006 14:13:03 GMT -5
They make sense if you you want to promote a hegemonic model of American policy on the rest of the world...a world which will resent such a model, and, if implemented, will cause a radical backlash that was never intended...witness, Latin America now and Iraq. As to the last post, it seems to be the "Blame Clinton" meme that has such tired resononance, that I know you know better. I'll reread to see if I can see the necessity of hegemony in what they wrote. But first I've got to get back to brit. I didn't mean it as "blame Clinton." The point was merely that back when the advice was given, the consequences of following it might have been less drastic. Mentioning Clinton was more a neutral reference to the fact that he was President at that point than an attempt to blame him for the current situation. After all Bush & Co. did what they did under the circumstances in which they did it, and apparently without any realization of how things might turn out.
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Post by gailkate on Dec 8, 2006 20:03:07 GMT -5
I'm going to cull from J*'s cull and get down to what seems most disturbing in this piece. Let's hope Green isn't sibylline in his analysis.
More likely is that the civil war rages on, gets a lot worse, then gets a lot worse again by dragging in surrounding states like Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then perhaps gets even worse yet by inflaming the region sufficiently to diminish the flow of oil to, and therefore also the economies of, those parts of the world which depend on the black heroin, which nowadays means just about everybody outside of Myanmar and Bhutan. About the only thing ‘good’ you can say concerning this crisis is that, in our (rapidly-fading) unipolar moment, it is unlikely to suck in a gaggle of adversarial big dogs into a great power war, a la Sarajevo in 1914, but even that can’t be guaranteed. Everybody’s got interests at play in those latitudes.
I’m not predicting the dire outcome of a regionalized civil war at this point, but I would say it is a more likely bet than the best-case scenario described above, which is of course itself hardly any picnic. Let’s not forget just how not-good that best-case scenario is, and how incredibly costly it would be as well – politically, morally, fiscally and strategically.
Maybe I should talk Jerry into moving south - say, to Venezuela - as the cold north is not a wise place to live if the Middle East implodes. I don't think it is hysterical doomsaying to consider grave consequences that go well beyond Iraq.
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Post by juliastar on Dec 10, 2006 8:44:29 GMT -5
Editorial: “About Those Other Problems” New York Times, 10 December 2006 No one could ever suggest that James Baker lacks ambition or self-confidence. So it is not surprising that along with its effort to salvage Iraq, the report from Mr. Baker’s Iraq Study Group offers some strong advice on how to fix George W. Bush’s dysfunctional Washington–and the president’s dysfunctional relations with the rest of the world. We were particularly drawn to Recommendations 46, 72 and 78. Under separate headings dealing with the military, the federal budget, and the nation’s intelligence agencies, they share one basic idea: Government officials should not lie to the public or each other, especially in matters of war. One should not need a blue ribbon commission to know that. But the fact that it had to be said, and so often, in the report goes a long way toward explaining how Mr. Bush got the country into the Iraq mess and why it is proving so hard to dig out of it. Consider Recommendation 46, which calls on the new secretary of defense to create “an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice” to civilian leaders, including the president. That is their sworn duty. But the back story is the Pentagon’s pre-war refusal to listen to the former Army chief of staff (and who knows how many other generals) who warned that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize a post-invasion Iraq. The good news is that the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, acknowledged as much in his confirmation hearings. The bad news is that Mr. Bush has not. Recommendation 72 says that “costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the president’s annual budget request.” The report warns that the White House’s habit of using emergency funding for the war has eroded both “budget discipline” and Congressional oversight. And just in case you were worrying that you had not been paying sufficient attention to the war’s price tag, the report says the White House presents its requests in such a “confusing manner” that only detailed analyses by budget experts can answer “what should be a simple question: How much money is the president requesting for the war in Iraq?” And finally, Recommendation 78 calls on the Pentagon and the intelligence community to “institute immediate changes” in how they collect data on violence in Iraq “to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground.” The report says that officials have used a standard for recording attacks (it notes that “a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted”) that systematically under-reports Iraq’s mayhem. It cites one day this past July when the government recorded 93 “attacks or significant acts of violence,” while the Iraq Study Group’s own analysis “brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.” Sprinkled among the recommendations, the report also has some homespun advice on how Mr. Bush might fix America’s foreign relations. It suggests that the nature of diplomacy is to engage with adversaries as well as friends. And it warns that the United States does Israel “no favors” by refusing to try to broker peace in the Middle East, adding that it is “an axiom that when the political process breaks down there will be violence on the ground.” It is mind-boggling that this commission felt compelled to deliver Governing 101 lessons to the president of the United States. But that fits with the implicit message of the entire exercise–a rebuke of the ideologically blinkered way Mr. Bush operates. The report shows that there have always been plenty of alternatives to Mr. Bush’s stubborn insistence on staying the course, and that if he were just willing to make an effort, it would be possible to forge a bipartisan consensus on the toughest issues. It is tragic that Mr. Bush could not figure that out for himself. It is far past time for him to heed this new advice.
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Post by joew on Dec 10, 2006 16:38:48 GMT -5
… In re-reading Professor Caws remarks, LISTEN to what he is saying. He is NOT talking about one particular war. He is talking about the imbecility of the current administration which you seem to support. I must say I don't see "the imbecility of the current administration" as his primary focus. In the article which he wrote, he says, "I will leave aside the excruciating problem of what new military policy to pursue in those two years – how to mitigate the damage done in Iraq and to American credibility and security, by a President with a dangerously simplistic view of the world …." Obviously, there has been damage done in Iraq, and the number of Islamic fundamentalists who are ready to engage in violence against the United States and other Western nations seems to have increased. At this point, it is not possible to say that the world is better as a result of the invasion of Iraq. OTOH, I think it likely that better planning, better strategy, and better tactics could have limited the harm. But Caws' principal point appears to me to be that we need to "confront the future rationally," an endeavor which is hindered by a couple of factors. First he says, "I want … to draw attention to a downside of the two- and four-year cycle of elections – namely that it foreshortens the future. The constant preoccupation with re-election, with possible or actual changes in the Administration, with legacies and lame ducks, keeps almost everyone’s attention on the near term, and inhibits genuine long-range planning." I completely agree with him on that point. He goes on to say, "In the popular mind the future is nearly always end-stopped by some looming event. … In looking to the future three big scenarios have helped to prevent people from thinking constructively – the World War III scenario, the Rapture scenario, and the space-travel scenario. The first two are linked in a sinister way, since some fanatics believe that World War III, as Armageddon, will hasten the Rapture. The last is an old science-fiction warhorse, sometimes trotted out as an answer to possible planetary over-crowding. But what if (as I think likely) none of these things is actually going to happen? What if we confronted the future rationally, taking into account the problems of armaments, of global warming, of runaway population growth, and made them the object of genuine national and international reflection and collaboration, above partisanship, even above clashes of civilizations? Why should we believe this to be impossible? What if we had spent our 250 billion dollars on something like that, instead of on a pointless war against an admittedly badly-governed country that was no threat to us? What if, once we’ve recovered (if we ever do) from the hemorrhage of national resources into the Iraqi quagmire, we decide to spend the next 250 billion on tackling the real future, along with the friends and allies we might win back with such an initiative? It might make a big difference to the fate of the world." Here I find myself in disagreement with his examples and the premise of his final paragraph. The World War III scenario, if I understand what he means by it, was not a bad thing. The fear of World War III kept the Cold War from turning into a nuclear world war. And I think that the desire to reduce the lure of Communism to the third world motivated a good deal of international assistance. As for the rapture and space travel, I doubt that anyone in a position to deal with the problems he cites is kept from doing so by those possibilities. Neither is an imminent enough prospect for anyone in government or academia to put off thinking about the current situation. And the premise that if we hadn't spent the money on Iraq we would have spent it on thinking about the other problems seems to me far from certain; and furthermore, what is needed in order to think constructively is not a pile of money. What is needed is wisdom and concern. The report on his talk is sketchy. For example, it doesn't give his basis for suggesting that the Bush administration has, in the reporter's paraphrase, "dramatically diminished" the "combination of radical thinking and philosophical groundwork" in our "original political system." When Prof. Caws says, "The American project is a universal project, not at its core a nationalist project. The prospects for democracy aren't bad if you allow the people to rise to their potential," I suspect the Bush administration would agree and say that is why they wanted to bring democracy to Iraq. But the main point seems to be the university's role in "instilling knowledge and reason … The university is the place from which all human knowledge is accessible," he said. "Our graduates should leave with the ability to look up knowledge to feed [their own] direct knowledge...They need a knowledge of the human world and, above all, a knowledge of themselves." I quite agree with this basic point. In this context, I think it unfortunate that many people seem to regard university as a place to learn work skills and that many universities accomodate themselves to the desire of their students for "useful" courses.
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