After making the most of every moment while studying international relations at the University of Washington over the last few years, I understand regarding international politics how one's contingency dictates another's response.
When you invade establish a precedent of invading marked enemies under the rationale that they have the potential to develop weapons of mass destruction sometime in the future, then you only encourage other already marked enemies to get those same weapons before they too are invaded. So it comes as no surprise that North Korea and Iran are so intent on getting those weapons as soon as possible.
wrote a piece in Thursday's Washington Post about how our current foreign policy is rationally flawed in that regard.
Wishful thinking on the part of the advocacy group :
A group of old Washington hands has launched a campaign to remakeInternet politics, taking a forum that until now has been associatedwith ideologues and angry partisans and using it to start a movementculminating in a bipartisan presidential ticket in 2008.
Thegroup is called Unity08, and no one would accuse its founders ofthinking small. They include Democrats Hamilton Jordan and GeraldRafshoon, who gained political fame for their role in electing JimmyCarter 30 years ago, as well as Doug Bailey, a media adviser to formerpresident and representative Gerald R. Ford (R-Mich.). They are beingjoined by former Maine governor Angus King, an independent.
Their goal is to offer an alternative to the two major party choices --a unity ticket that will emerge after secure, online balloting thatthey hope will include millions of Americans. In an announcementstatement, Unity08 said its efforts are a reaction to a system that has"polarized and alienated the American people" through partisanship andinterest-group politics.
A unity ticket never works because there would turn out to be a major argument over who would be on the top of the ticket. The president, not the vice president, has the ultimate say in Executive decisions.
Such a unity ticket would result in one of two polar extremes. One possibility is that the Democrat and Republican would secretly work against each other while in the White House. The vice president would constantly be trying to alienate the president, while the president would have to watch his back the entire time. As a result, with nothing getting done, this leads to an unhealthy decrease in the role of the Executive.
The other possibility is that the president and vice president would work together, bringing their parties together as a result. Therefore, the U.S. would only have a one-party system -- meaning no other party could be there to hold the party in power accountable. Is that really good for democracy?
So in either case, in my view, the unity party idea is a bad idea.
More than ever, especially after the poor planning for hurricane Katrina and the strategic blunder of a war in Iraq, we are learning a lot about how a bunch of allied, power-hungry micro-managers are a whole lot more damaging to this country than having a level-headed, efficiently funded bureaucracy with checks to prevent an abuse power.
Today, we were reminded once again why having a small group of people with a large amount of power runs the risk of allowing potential abuses within the system. A report in the to investigate his weak, rubber-stamp oversight into Bush's warrantless domestic spy program:
An internal Justice Department inquiry into whether department officials -- including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft-- acted properly in approving and overseeing the Bush administration'sdomestic eavesdropping program was stymied because investigators weredenied security clearances to do their work. The investigators,however, were only seeking information and documents relating to theNational Security Agency's surveillance program that were already inthe Justice Department's possession, two senior government officialssaid in interviews.
It is pretty obvious why President Bush keeps nominating his special counsels, such as Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales, for all these high posts. They are 'yes sir' people with lasting loyalties to the President. A patronage system like that only invites the possibility of having our Executive Branch being run by a group of allied individuals that make rubber stamping White House policy a higher priority than enforcing the law.
There is nothing wrong with the Executive Branch having their own ideological view about how to fight the war on terrorism. But to prevent both internal and external oversight into the manner by which the Executive Branch routinely carries out that ideology goes against the very principles that our government was founded upon.
Finally, after months and months of debating inside the Pentagon, the defense agency issued a report insisting that it should no longer pay Iraqi journalists to insert propaganda into Iraqi newspapers because it goes against the democratic belief in free press.
But then by concluding that private companies head the disinformation effort instead:
According to a summary of the investigation led byRear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk, the Pentagon failed to consider whetherthe payments would "undermine the concept of a free press in Iraq," andmust now implement procedures to "ensure proper oversight" of theprivate contractors leading the propaganda effort.
This appears to be a reference to the Lincoln Group,a Washington-based firm that, according to press reports last fall, waspaid to plant articles in Iraqi newspapers without revealing thestories were written by the military. The Lincoln Group also paid someIraqi journalists directly for favorable press.
The mere "oversight of contractors leading the propaganda effort" is another way of saying that the propaganda effort will continue. The bottom line is that our tax dollars will continue to fund disinformation efforts in what we are trying to make a thriving democracy -- what a paradox!
Sadly, the Pentagon leadership fails to understand what makes a democracy in the first place. A democracy starts from the ground-up, not from the disinformants-down. When you get into the position of trying to convince a country to become a democracy, you know that you are in real trouble. If Donald Rumsfeld ever read the great political philosopher John Locke, he would have learned that the most successful civil government is not one where the consent to rule is merely supplied, but instead it is one where the consent to rule is demanded by the people.
Our election system is privately financed in a way that disproportionately benefits incumbents. This is only fitting, considering that lawmakers who would eventually be incumbents themselves made the laws to begin with. Nonetheless, every decade or so there is a populist-driven impulse by voters to clear the slate of incumbents, responding to what they consider to be a combination of bad spending habits, elitism and corruption.
about how that anti-incumbent sentiment will play a factor this November:
But there are signs of broader disaffection. A new WashingtonPost-ABC News poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed said theyare inclined to look around for someone new rather than support theirincumbent members of Congress this fall, the highest level ofanti-incumbency since the 1994 midterm elections that dethronedDemocrats on Capitol Hill.
Oregon pollster Tim Hibbits said thatRepublicans in Congress may be most at risk because they are in themajority but added that Democrats in some states with economic problemsmay suffer as well. "At the federal level, Republicans are in forbetween a bad night and a very bad night" in November, Hibbits said."But at local and state level, whoever is in power in those localitieswhere people are in trouble" could face problems, he said.
Thedefeats of Pennsylvania Senate President Pro Tempore Robert C.Jubelirer, Majority Leader David J. Brightbill and at least a dozenother state legislators there stunned the political establishment.Grass-roots protests brought primary challenges to 61 incumbentlegislators, the most since 1980, according to the PhiladelphiaInquirer.
Being a history student myself, it is easy to look for patterns -- or in other words, common variables that produce the same consequences for different historical eras. Yet, for some reason, we never seem to learn from our mistakes. Take Vietnam and Watergate for example. Take the increase in Executive power during the Weimar years in Germany. Take the over-extending of the military by ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and 19th and 20th century Britain. The same patterns keep reoccurring over and over again, and we have especially been seeing examples of that over the last few years. In many ways, this November, the Magna Carta will happen all over again.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , noting the negative implications that a foreign policy based on military preventionism has on a democratic system:
But our Cold War presidents kept to the Kennan formula ofcontainment plus deterrence, and we won the Cold War without escalatingit into a nuclear war. Enter George W. Bush as the great exponent ofpreventive war. In 2003, owing to the collapse of the Democraticopposition, Bush shifted the base of American foreign policy fromcontainment-deterrence to presidential preventive war: Be silent; I see it, if you don't.Observers describe Bush as "messianic" in his conviction that he isfulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his secondinaugural address, "The Almighty has His own purposes."
Therestretch ahead for Bush a thousand days of his own. He might use them tostart the third Bush war: the Afghan war (justified), the Iraq war(based on fantasy, deception and self-deception), the Iran war (alsofantasy, deception and self-deception). There is no more dangerousthing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidentialpreventive war.
Maybe President Bush, who seems a humane man,might be moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solopreventive war and return to cooperation with other countries in theinterest of collective security. Abraham Lincoln would rejoice.
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The question that I often ask myself from time to time while studying for my history degree at the University of Washington is why do some of our most powerful leaders never seem to learn from history? Or, quite possibly, maybe a better question to ask is why do they try to defy history? Over and over again, ever since the beginning of representative democracy, most notably in England and in Germany, a policy of preventionism (definition: one attacking another on the rationale that the other would pose a threat sometime down the road) only increases the mandate of the Executive to a level where normative arguments without reasoning are rhetorically used to quell any opposition.
We are a nation built on democracy. Representatively speaking, our governmental system is built on both a separation and a balance between three branches of power. It is difficult to make the case today, as a result of this Administration, that our three branches are holding equal weight.
AP writer David Bauder is drooling all over Sean Hannity in . In it, he quoted the Fox News host saying something about President Bush that most Americans would disagree with:
"Let me be straight with you — I like George Bush,"Hannity said. "I think he's a man of principle, a man of faith. I thinkhe's got a backbone of steel and he's a real, genuine, big-time leader... He's a consequential figure for his time."
A "consequential" figure? From the two philosophy classes that I have taken as a University of Washington student, I have developed this definition of consequentialism:
The belief that what makes an action good or bad depends on the outcome of the action, not whether the action was intended to be good or bad.
So in other words, in order to determine whether Bush is a consequentialist one would have to judge whether Bush thinks mostly about outcomes?
In my personal view, I don't believe he thinks in outcomes. He over-extended our military with the intent of pursuing a nation-building operation in Iraq, yet he failed to understand the consequences that it would have on our ability to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He intended to convince the public that we needed to go to war, yet he failed to comprehend the consequences of his Administration leaking sensitive intelligence in order to do so. He intended to increase the Republican money advantage, yet he failed to realize that it was wrong to associate himself with crooked people like Jack Abramoff. These are obviously just a few of many examples.
Hannity's notion that Bush is a consequentialist does not add up.
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