Month: April 2003

“President Bush will tell Americans on Thursday evening that the major fighting in Iraq is over and the threat to the United States has ended, a Bush administration spokesman said.”

No, really, that’s what he said. The threat is gone.

What threat was that again? Cause as so elegantly espoused here, we didn’t find any threat. We found no weapons of mass destruction. No evidence that Saddam had a viable nuclear program. Saddam didn’t use the hypothetical weapons of mass destruction as a last gasp. We didn’t find any of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the terrorist base in Northern Iraq.

If Saddam by some miracle smuggled all the chemical warheads into Syria before the war ended, well, then the threat is pretty much not gone — just moved. So that must not be an ongoing hypothesis, which is good, because it was pretty damned unlikely.

We took apart Saddam’s army in under a month; that wasn’t very threatening.

What exactly was Saddam going to do that posed such a big threat to the US? Answers may not postulate chemical weapons until we actually find some.

Not surprising but rather important: the US military presence in Saudi Arabia is ending. This had been coming for a while — the Saudis didn’t let us use those bases for Gulf War II, for example. It’s also a smart move, since those troops have been the source of a lot of tension. Bin Laden will tout it as a victory, which is a minor PR coup for him, but without them there some of his support will also fade.

The interesting question is what happens now. In the short term, we can expect to see something around 100,000 troops in Iraq. Rumsfeld claims there won’t be any permanent bases. I think that the question of a permanent presence in Iraq probably doesn’t need to be made right now, from the administration’s point of view. It’ll be a few years before we can pull out of Iraq, given our stated goals.

(For that matter, even as an anti-war advocate, I couldn’t support pulling out right now. We’d leave the country in worse shape than it was in under Saddam and you could bet on Kurdish/Arab civil war within six months.)

Anyhow, I’d bet that Rumsfeld and Powell are planning on making a decision about permanent bases in Iraq after 2004, if they’re still around, since nobody can really be sure what the Middle East will look like in a few years. Maybe the Palestinian peace process will work. Maybe there’ll be a revolution in Iran. Maybe Syria will display nuclear capacity. No point, from Bush’s point of view, in making the decision until we know more.

Hey! Why aren’t Democrats winning the culture wars? Because conservatives are supporting college Republicans like this while liberals support college Democrats like this. Note in particular the differences between the Conservative Student Conference schedule and the Young Democrats Association schedule. On the one hand, you have a reception and a tour to Niagara Falls. On the other hand, you have lessons (or, if you like, indoctrination) on criticizing “liberal textbook bias” and becoming “a more effective advocate for your beliefs.” Also, one’s in Buffalo and one is in Washington, DC. Which city is more apropos if you want to encourage new blood to participate in the political process?

Similarly, the progressive left is blowing the Democrats away as far as student organization goes. I suspect some Democrats are blithely assuming that this chunk of the left is breeding future Democratic thinkers. Nope; this is the progressive wing of the left and it’s doing an excellent job of creating future progressive thinkers. Think Green Party.

This post should not be taken as approval of any particular segment of the left, or, for that matter, of the right. It’s just an observation, cause I’ve seen a few Democrats talking about party problems lately. Time to stop bitching about Nader and start recognizing the successful tactics of both the radical left and the radical right.

(Hey, I know I have some readers from outside the US. I am deeply curious about the sort of student outreach that exists in Australia and the UK, if there’s any.)