>we're apt to stir up more resentments--whether war or >UN-style police
actions. as such, we destabilize the region >and help till the soil for the
potential emergence of, well, >incredibly oppressive regimes run, possibly,
>by people who're severely pissed off.
I can't say for sure that I would be against a UN role in first policing and then re-building Afghanistan. But this is like dreaming for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Look how long it took both the UN and conditions in Cambodia to get anywhere near ready for that. Even a NATO police action (perhaps bringing in the partners for peace) would require more consultation than what has taken place with what is happening now.
It's interesting to see just how much the UN (and NGOs who follow it around the world) was already doing in Afghanistan before the bombs started dropping.
But Doug' and Chip's rhetoric finds parallels in the stuff I'm reading in the mainstream. First, with Chip and the fascist thing. Then with Doug and the police action thing (DOD people are already saying how this time the use of armed forces on the ground will be more like a police action).
There is a tenuous, possibly artificial linkage here and a rush to judgement. It's obvious to me that there is a distinct possibility that the attacks that so horrified the US and world WEREN'T directly controlled from Afghanistan.
Even if stuff led back to Afghanistan, OBL and the Taliban, there were far more pressing issues starting with the US itself and fanning out to W. Europe and the so-called 'moderate' Arab states. Many groups, MOST NOT IN AFGHANISTAN, signed on to OBL's jihad. Many of these are Arab and some Pakistani (for whom Kashmir is as much an objective as Afghanistan).
As they signed on to the jihad, a number of things must have been on the Arab groups' minds:
-that Islamic fundamentalists couldn't come to power in elections (lesson from Algeria) and western democracies wouldn't back them up, -that the peace process in Israel and Palestine meant basically the US forcing moderate Palestinians to appease extremist Israelis, -that the world really didn't give a shit about how many Iraqis died in the war and in the period of continued military action and sanctions -that secular, nationalist governments in Arab countries provided no answers (and it was just such governments who found the Afghani Arabs such a threat to their credibility)
But years and years of awful foreign policy aren't going to be overcome with a UN police action in Afghanistan. Nor are years and years of awful federal policy within the US.
If the US left, what little there is of it in American politics besides journalistic celebrities, makes anything of this crisis it will be to hold Americans in power responsible for their incompetence. It will have to start doing so in plain language (though the motherfucker comments in the NY Observer might be a little too plain).
That starts with homeland security and defense--and the total lack of it. This was and still is the most important concern. The drive to externalize the threat in the form of 'clerical fascists' and 'motherfuckers' in Afghanistan is just a distracting sideshow.
In 1999 and 2000, the think tanks were feeding Congress and the White House reports about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorist groups.
The experts were distracted by the 'lessons' learned from Oklahoma City and Aum Shinrikyou. (What was one lesson? That the federal government is a sprawling mess and the incompetents at the FBI who gave us Waco should be in charge of all these new anti-terrorist efforts in the US.)
And Clinton boosted spending on anti-terrorism to 10 billion dollars a year and put out an incoherent mess of misguided homeland security activities, interagency coordination rivallary follies, plus all the usual overseas spook stuff (and a sloppy dollop of war on drugs to boot). Then he also turned up the heat on OBL without a 'knock out punch'. Bad idea. Then Bush took over and, among other things, obsessed over N. Korea getting missiles to hit the US (a Clinton obssession, too). Oh, and the usual antics with Iraq of course.
This is the stuff Doug and Chip ought to talking about because it helps to explain the largely self-created mess the US finds itself in. Something like: sheesh, you'd think the bipartisan establishment that micromanaged the business cycle and made Kuwait safe for democracy could come up with adequate airport security.
Charles Jannuzi