Charles Krauthammer gave the keynote address at the CWA. In it he made his case for the neo-con approach to world affairs. First off, I would like to say thank you to him and to all of the others that have come to the CWA to talk. I really appreciate their doing so - the conference has been amazing.
And I found that he made a number of good points, some that I agreed with and some that I could see the logic behind although I didn't fully agree with his conclusions.
But with that said, I also have some questions for him on his points.
First, to your point that the only solution to solving problems with other countries is at the point of a gun. Exactly how does you propose to do that with North Korea. Yes diplomacy has failed so far. But a war with North Korea would be devastating to South Korea (Seoul is maybe 40 miles from the border) and horrible for China. And in the course of the war we could end up with an atomic bomb detonated in an American city.
Second, do you claim that the neo-con approach is the only approach for any country? Do we invade France every time the get pissy (which is basically always)? What is wrong with the liberal approach of treaties with countries that do abide by the rule of law? This is not just the first world but also many third world countries.
Third, when you say that the liberal internationalism and realism won't work - isn't that the combination we used in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea that turned them from dictatorships into democracies? And an even better example is China where they are going down the same road Taiwan and South Korea already travelled.
Fourth you talk about Bush having the right approach with his decision to invade Iraq. Ok, let's postulate that he does and give him an A for approach. What do we given him for implamentation? (I'd say an F-.)
While the U.S. does not need the approval of the U.N. to act (we did not have it when Clinton took us in to Yugoslavia), there is a lot to be gained by having allies. Don't you think that Clinton or Reagan would have had the French merely annoyed and the Germans and Russians quietly accepting if they had been President taking us to war in Iraq. Instead the Bush team seemed almost to purposely piss everyone off. They violated Churchill's maxim that the only thing worse than having allies is not having allies.
And how they handled the peace in Iraq is just short of criminal. And it's not like there were not only tons of studies discussing how to win the peace, but there were tons of recent examples from Panama to Bosnia. And yet they appeared blind to all of this.
So how would you score their implementation?
And finally, I ask you more as a psychiatrist than as a political columnist, what do you make of the Bush administrations almost pathalogical unwillingness to learn from others or to learn from their own mistakes? Their unwillingness to look outside their own preconceptions just boggles the mind.
thank you.
