> Once the Pentagon has exhausted all the stop-gap measures, what will
> it do? A major change in US policy toward China and North Korea, which
> will allow for a larger-scale shift of US troops from Japan and South
> Korea to Iraq than the aforementioned move of 3,600 troops? Not very
> likely -- John Kerry is no Richard Nixon. Having done the math, some
> activists, therefore, have launched a preemptive attack on the draft:
> e.g., People Against the Draft.
Who *is* another Richard Nixon? No one that I know of, fortunately. And I don't have any problem with getting a head start on anti-draft activity, even though I broadly agree with the arguments that have been made in this thread that the Pentagon really doesn't want a big bunch of draftees on their hands, etc. If a serious push to start a draft ever starts, the movement shouldn't be caught flat-footed.
However, the broader question of what Kerry's probable foreign policy, should he be elected, might look like is also worth looking into. One attempt to read the tea leaves that I suggest people look at is Josh Marshall's article which is upcoming in The Atlantic (on the Web now at <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/07/marshall.htm >). An excerpt:
"[Kerry foreign policy adviser Dan] Feldman outlined a course that starkly departed from the one charted by President Bush, yet was equally unlike the approach--characterized by soft multilateralism and fealty to the United Nation--portrayed by Re-publicans as typical of Democratic foreign policy. Feldman emphasized the need for skilled diplomatic management and a willingness to use force abroad, but also an essential caution. The more he spoke, the more he called to mind the policies of the first Bush Administration.
"George H.W. Bush has receded into history. But his Administration's traditional if unimaginative attitude toward foreign relations lives on through his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, who re-emerged two years ago as one of the most unabashed and difficult-to-dismiss critics of the buildup to war in Iraq. Democrats once viewed Scowcroft as the champion of an amoral and shortsighted foreign policy that sacrificed American values in order to achieve stable relations with great powers and avoid trouble in hot spots like the Balkans (a view, incidentally, shared by many of the neoconservatives who surround the current President). It was Scowcroft who secretly traveled to Beijing shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre to reassure the Chinese that government-to-government relations needn't suffer despite the bipartisan indignation of the American public. But in 2002, lacking a consistent criticism of the drive toward war, many Democrats eagerly took shelter in Scowcroft's high-profile opposition.
"Wondering how he would take it, I said to Feldman, 'What you're describing to me sounds a lot like what I'd expect from Brent Scowcroft.'
" 'Yes,' he said. 'I think a lot of what you'd see from a Kerry Administration might be like that. I think there'd be a lot of similarities.' When I later made the same suggestion to Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, Rand Beers, he agreed."
Also: "Kerry's advisers focus less exclusively on nation-states like those Bush identified in his infamous 'Axis of Evil' speech and more on the host of diffuse dangers that have arisen in the wake of globalization: destabilization, arms smuggling, and terrorism." Marshall argues that, while the Bush administration has proceeded on the assumption that states are the "key actors on the world stage, and relations among them as the primary concern of U.S. foreign policy," a Kerry administration would probably infer from the Clinton administration's experience in the Balkans that "soft-sounding concerns like human-rights abuses, ethnic slaughter, lawlessness, and ideological extremism could quickly mount into first-order geopolitical crises," and learn a lesson from the policy the Clintonites moved toward, which another Kerry adviser, Jonathan Winer, describes thusly: "[the Clinton administration] moved much more to a failed-state, global-affairs kind of approach, recognizing that the trends established by globalization required you to think about foreign policy in a more synthetic and integrated fashion than nation-state to nation-state."
Yada, yada, right? We've heard all this talk before. Anyway, Marshall suggests that Kerry's administration would focus less on brute military force in the Bush style and more on non-military kinds of "nation-building" activities to stabilize the areas of the world in which terrorists theoretically arise. He doesn't connect this with the concept of the Pentagon running out of troops, but I think it's at least conceivable that the Kerry folks are worried about this, and will, at least initially, take off in a quite different direction from the Bushie neo-con "rule the whole world by armed force" approach.
Of course, as a method for supporting the U.S. imperium, this won't work any better than the Bush approach -- nothing will work to do that. But at least it looks on paper like a difference between Kerry and Bush, for those who are looking for some.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile