What is wrong with some of these Dems?

What is mainly wrong with them is just what Rieff suggests. Where foreign policy is concerned, the Democratic Party as a whole is just not that different at the elite level from the Republican Party. Some Democratic poobahs and office-seekers have fastened tenuously onto the Iraq issue because they know the war has gone badly, and that most of their constituents are sick of it. But that is just an opportunistic tactic of the moment. Nothing really significant about US foreign policy is going to change with the Democrats in charge, other than some of the diplomatic atmospherics. Democrats like to put a bit more emphasis on the attractive power of being liked. Republicans are a bit more enamored of the coercive power of being feared. But ultimately both parties are committed to the very same geostrategic ends.

Another thing that is wrong with them is that the only thing most office-holders and top operatives really know how to do is run for office. Where the world outside America is concerned, they have no ideas, no guts and no clue. They are good at reading polls, and identifying the sources of campaign contributions, but that's it. In the case of Iran, they have calculated that supporting a tough policy on Iran is lower-cost than rejecting it. The handful of people who really matter in the party support tough anti-Iran posture. If candidates oppose that posture, they will hurt themselves with the power-brokers. They will take a lot of flack from their constituents, but in the end those constituents will vote for them anyway because they have nowhere else to go. And if Bush goes to war with Iran and it goes poorly, he will get the lion's share of the blame anyway - not the Democrats who supported him. After all, have any Democrats yet paid a real political price - other than having to endure a certain amount of grief from people like me - for their support of the Iraq war?

We need a 12 step program for Progressives to cure them of their addiction to voting for a party that doesn't represent them.

Here's a start. If the party is voting to fund the war, the party is voting to fund the war. Got that? If your brain is still programmed to believe that a candidate who votes to fund the war is against the war, then sign up for another support meeting. You still need deprogramming.

With all due respect, I found the article shallow. If one wants America to forego war, then say so. If we want to forego war on selected countries, then name the countries and the reasons war should never be an option.

I don't mind taking war off the table for, say, Britain. But what compelling reason do we have for taking it off the table for Iran?

David Rieff (born September 28, 1952, in Boston) is a nonfiction writer and policy analyst. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and other publications.

Rieff is the only child of Susan Sontag. His father, whom Sontag married in her teens and divorced in her 20s, is Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of A Moralist.

Rieff graduated from Princeton University in 1978, and was a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1978 to 1989, working with such authors as Joseph Brodsky, Elias Canetti, Carlos Fuentes, Alberto Moravia, Les Murray, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

He is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research, a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch and a board member of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute.

Rieff has expressed strong disapproval of the American policies and actions that both informed and followed the invasion of Iraq [1].

[edit] Books

* Texas Boots (with Sharon Delano) (Studio/Penguin, 1981)
* Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles and Refugees in the New America (Little, Brown, 1987)
* The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami (Simon & Schuster, 1993)
* Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (Simon & Schuster, 1991)
* Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
* Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (Co-editor, with Roy Gutman) (W. W. Norton, 1999)
* A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
* At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

[edit] Commentary

* Carnegie Council's resources by David Rieff
* PBS Frontline interview with Rieff (online only) (March 25, 2003)
* Curtis Bowman commentary on Rieff opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (April 7, 2005)
* Foreign Affairs review of At the Point of a Gun (March/April 2005)
* Archive of writings by David Rieff for The Nation.

Let's hope the second part of the following proves to be untrue - "Dumb Republican leadership leads us into Iraq war of choice with many Democrats going along in 2002-2003. Dumb Democratic leadership leads us into Iran war of choice with many Republicans going along in 2009".

I don't know how long we can survive with this level of stupidity in power.

Tom

According to my observations, this business about what is on our table is never offered as a response to a question; rather it is offered as any bully would dare someone to knock a chip off of his shoulder. Declaring (or needing to declare)that war is "on the table" is the problem in the first place.

In fact, as everyone on this planet knows, war is a menu item for anyone who attacks us. EVERYONE knows that.

By bringing up the "table" every time a country disagrees with us, it is just demonstrates the weakness of our leadership. Does a policeman have to remind people lined up in a bank that he has a gun and isn't afraid to use it to keep a potential bank robber in line?

The only reason it is off (the table) for Britain or Canada is because we can safely assume they are not currently antagonistic to us. By trotting out this childish and obvious threat it makes us look weak rather than strong.

Jan Knaus

Rieff might as well have been talking about the split between America Abroad posters and TPMCafe commenters.

Eliot Engel and Gary Ackerman doing Aipac's bidding? Is it possible? Rahm Emanuel actually led the effort and he served in the Israeli army but Engel and Ackerman are loyal foot soldiers.

what compelling reason do we have for taking war off the table for Iran?

Well, everyone credible says attacking Iran is a terrible idea with no chance of success. I think that's compelling.

The "on the table"/"off the table" talk is just sound bite stuff. I think we all know that the United States does not maintain a global military presence for no reason, and that the threat of military action against uncooperative states is always in some sense "on the table." That discussion is at the superficial level of tactics, but skirts debate of the underlying strategy, and of any issues that fly beneath the crude cable news radar systems.

The United States could have detente with Iran whenever it wants. It could have a resolution of the nuclear issue on terms providing perfectly adequate assurances of Iranian behavior. It could have a Middle East political arrangement based on a balance of power among independent states, and evenhanded US relations with all those states. It could have a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along lines established by UN 242.

But there are two many powerful foreign and domestic interests who do not want these outcomes, interests that have a great deal of leverage over the US government and are able to guide its foreign policies.

This has nothing to do with "containing" the dastardly and ridiculously over-hyped Iranian Satantic Mullahcracy.

It's about the future of Iraq's oil reserves, the future of Iran's oil reserves and the future of OPEC.

It's about destroying Hizbollah, destroying Hamas, and clearing the way for permanent Israeli hegemony over all of Palestine.

It's about preserving local Saudi dominance of the oil-producing regions, and the highly profitable security-for-oil racket that has bound the US to the Saudi Kingdom for decades - a racket in which the Bush family has played a key part.

It's about achieving the dominance of US interests on both sides of the Shatt-al-Arab and the Persian Gulf.

It's about punishing any states that seek to practice a form of national independence and self-determination based on the pursuit of national interest, and rewarding only those who incorporate themselves into the tri-partite US imperial system of finance, commerce and military control.

It is about punishing defiance of any kind, refusing to negotiate with "lesser" powers on an equal footing, and enforcing a posture of abject submission in the Middle East and around the globe.

It is about destroying the only regime in the region with substantial democratic institutions, and crushing any form of Islamic democracy that might serve as a model for its neighbors.

It is about eliminating a regime that makes some major business deals with China and Russia, and replacing it with another subsidiary of USA Inc.

It is probably also to some degree about Saudi oil blackmail, administered directly to VP Cheney when he visited that country last year. It was after that visit, and a subsequent and more public Saudi threats to flood Iraq with disgruntled Saudi jihadists conveyed in newspaper editorials, that the propaganda campaign against Iran was kicked into high gear, including the melodramas about the Great Shia Conversion Threat and the Great Iraq Meddling Threat.

Their lips were moving.

Bottom line: Americans love war! We think it's like football. Americans took the old football cliche (Winning isn't everything--it's the ONLY thing)to heart. That's why we want "macho" presidents who strut around and act tough.
What a bunch of doofusses!

Because resort to military force in cases other than self-defense constitutes a war crime for which people have been hanged in the past. How's that a reason to declare war off the table?

But not only have we threatened Iran with war repeatedly, we've explicitly threatened to nuke them - in violation of all sorts of international laws. How would you like it if the Iranians declared nuking the US to be "on the table"? Wouldn't we call that "terrorism"?

“During an impromptu April 18 press conference,President George W. Bush was asked if his assertion that “all options are on the table” regarding Iran included the possibility of a nuclear strike. Bush reiterated, “All options are on the table. We want to solve this issue diplomatically, and we’re working hard to do so.” In no uncertain words, the president of the United States directly threatened Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike. It is hard to read his reply in any other way.”

And you wonder why the rest of the world considers the US and Israel to the greatest threat to peace?

Most of those who are now holding the door open to attack Iran were also in favor of attacking Iraq. This group includes most Republicans and HRC.

Who now speaks carefully at selected forums of leaving open the door to attack Iran after having had the smarts to oppose the Iraq adventure from the beginning? Only a presidential candidate trying to cover his right flank domestically, pandering to AIPAC, or both.

Rieff specifically mentions the Iranian nuclear program, not invading Iranian hordes in Minnesota. Is nuclear containment dead as an American policy?

What "America" and "American interests" are you referring to? (Perhaps you meant to type 'Israel' and 'Israeli interests' and something happened?)

Imaginary foes created by paranoid ideation don't qualify.

Americans have liked the Republican kind of war: against trivial opponents for trivial colonial stakes, using a colonial era mercenary army. Real wars, where everyone loses family members and your country gets invaded, your female relatives get raped, where children get shot and their bodies lie on the street, where cities are destroyed and civilians massacred...probably not so much.

Geez.

* Well, it would have been dead when Bush cut the funding for the Russian 'loose nukes' program.

* It certainly wasn't alive when Bush signed a nuclear deal with India to share technology it could use to upgrade its nuclear fleet, in violation fo the terms of the Non-Proliferation treaty.

* And it would have probably been dead when the CIA as part of an elaborate scam handed key nuclear weapons information over to Iran.

* It would have been dead when the Bush administration posted IRAQ'S WMD AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS FILES on the internet, resulting in every Arabic or Islamic country on the world suddenly announcing a nuclear program.

* Nuclear containment probably died as a policy when Bush mucked up Korea.

* I think Bush rammed a steel girder through the chest of nuclear containment when A.Q. Khan and Pakistan got caught red handed, Khan got a pardon for being a national hero, and Bush went 'fine with me.'

So yeah, I think the policy is dead.

Next question.

Does this only apply to Bush? Or, as Rieff suggests, to every Democratic candidate?

Well, for the record, Iraq was a war crime, not a preventative war.

Afghanistan... you do recall a little thing called 9/11. Al Quaeda's high command being quartered in Afghanistan? Situation of Attack on America there.

Korea was a situation where the U.S. announced that it would not defend South Korea. The North and South got into it. The South was losing. America changed its mind. The United Nations authorized intervention.

Vietnam was an escalation based on a fabrication - the Gulf of Tonkin incident. A fraud was perpetrated, to claim that American forces had been attacked. The whole thing didn't turn out so well. So yeah, that was a situation of an alleged Attack on America.

What if the Islamic extremists, let's say led by Osama, in Pakistan take over the Paki nuclear facilities?

And... this justifies attacking Iran how? Conceivably, it might justify an attack on Pakistan. But such an attack might do more harm than good. For instance, triggering a Pakistani nuclear weapon in Pakistan, or causing a radioactive dispersal that kills thousands. Such an attack, uninvited might well invoke a defensive response from Pakistan that would involve major fire or potential use of nuclear weapons against Americans. Such an attack might not be viable at all. Osama and pals might be long gone by the time we got around to organizing a response.

SeeDee

In the final analysis, stlounick, WHAT was the Iraq war supposed to prevent?

And, speaking of bin Laden, if Bush and mis-guided neo-cons had concentrated on elimination of Osama and Zawahiri instead of the grab for the oil resources of Iraq, we probably would not have the worry of 'what if' relevant to Pakistan's nukes.

And, certainly, it is far-fetched to believe that Shi'a dominated Iran is going to surrender authority of ITS nukes to Sunni bin Laden.