The New Yorker - A Democratic World - George Packer

[Dems2002]

This article is fantastic and is exactly where I stand on the issue. It boggles my mind that Democrats can't get their acts together over foreign policy. Can anyone find contact info for George Packer? I'd love to send him an e-mail.

Best,

Dems


A DEMOCRATIC WORLD
by GEORGE PACKER
Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?
Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23
Posted 2004-02-09
In December, 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, President Bush asked Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who was then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to draft a legislative proposal for winning the minds of young people around the Muslim world. The following month, Biden went to Kabul, where he toured a new school—one that was bitterly cold, with plastic sheeting over the windows and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. You cannot leave.”

“I promise I’ll come back,” Biden told her.

“You cannot leave,” the girl insisted. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040216fa_fact1

[NewYorkerfromMass]

1. I just finished reading it. It is dynamite, The Dems ARE getting it

I was blown away by this:

"....on September 30th Lugar, who was in touch with the White House, called him. “Joe, I fear in the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, the President’s going to cut a deal with Gephardt,” he said.

Biden was stunned. “Gephardt? Gephardt’s not going to do this.”

“Joe, I’m telling you. They’re working two sides here. They’re working us, keeping us occupied, but they’re working just as hard meeting with him. Whoever they reach an agreement with first, they’re going to go with.”

If Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic minority leader, came out for the Administration’s resolution, it would be politically almost impossible for any Republican to support the Biden-Lugar alternative. Biden had to gather the Democratic holdouts immediately and persuade them to stand behind his resolution so that he and Lugar could move it onto the Senate floor the next day.

That evening, Biden met with half a dozen leading Democrats who were opposed to any war resolution at all. “They said, ‘It’s not right, you’re not principled, asking us to do this,’” Biden recalled. “I said, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Please spare me the lecture. I thought our job was to do as much as we could to prevent this President from going off to war half-cocked. Does anybody in here believe that we’re going to get any resolution remotely approaching the constraints this resolution has?’” Biden warned his colleagues, “Guess what? Your principle is going to kill a lot of Americans.” But the antiwar Democrats were intractable. At the end of the meeting, Senator Paul Wellstone, of Minnesota, and Senator Barbara Boxer, of California, left the room arm in arm, chuckling...."

If Biden and Kerry had been in charge of the Senate effort- we would have had a much better resoultion. They did what they could to counter Bush's rush to war.

[FloridaPat]

2. There were no articles of impeachment introduced at the time.

They didn't do everything. They should not have voted on it until after the election. They should have been after Bush for all his lies.

[Democat]

3. Rather than make a realistic compromise, they gave away everything

Much like what the anti-ABB people are planning to do in November.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

5. Yes. They washed their hands of it

or at least they tried. They failed to recognize the full consequences of not doing everything possible to buy more time and slow Bush down.
It was irresponsible.

[teryang]

4. Our foreign policy establishment

...has no intention of building strong, prosperous, and sovereign democracies in the middle east or anywhere else for that matter. Our regimes designs on the world and its own people are entirely machiavellian in nature. It's a regime based entirely on lies and exploitation.

The war on terrorism and the war on Iraq are about empire abroad and a police state at home. The reason Americans can't get excited about democracy is because the basic underlying social reasons for a democracy rather than an aristocratic autocracy based upon status no longer exist. Contrary to Mr. Greenspan's assertions this is no longer a meritocracy where effort, study, enterprise, and skill are rewarded. Social mobility is being destroyed along with the middle class. Meanwhile the super rich have elevated themselves to the status of gods and need an absolutist police state to with a dynastic king to protect their ill gotten status.

The only thing that is rewarded in America is access to capital. If you don't have it, you are the 21st Century equivalent of a serf under the Czar. Your social obligation is to work to the death to pay off the tax collector, the insurance companies, the utility companies, the health care system and the dozens of other corporatist collectors. There is nothing to get motivated about here. America is a cynical stratified class society based upon class and ethnic origin.