Here's a fun analogy that I dig up every now and again: Uma Thurman has always claimed she doesn't believe she's that pretty.

Indeed, one could say she forswears her own beauty and the impact it has on men. But I don't think that makes her any less beautiful.

I'll also add this to the debate:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5308196622692748202

I am not trying to stoke a Nader revival.

The overwhelming majority of the working, consuming, middle class Americans will come to rue the day that did not heed Mr. Nader’s calls for a serious change in national policies. He was exactly right about who is running this country and for whose benifit and the best Democrat (as in he held/holds traditional Democratic Party) values to run for the Presidency since FDR. As Obama and Hillary began every day in every way to look like establishment flunkies who will keep us enmeshed in the blood and money consuming pit Bush and his traitorous and equally crooked Neo-Cons feloniously committed us to. If Robert Kagan blew Obama a wet kiss he should wash his mouth out before he comes down with the treason disease....or minimally hoof’en mouth.

That's pretty serious, accusing a politician of not having enough bullshit.

Re your comment, "The size of our military makes it possible to inflict extensive murder and mayhem, but its ability to achieve important political goals seems absent," which you conflate with Obama's goal of increasing the number of avaiable troops. The problem is not the size of our military in terms of manpower; the problem is the size of our military in terms of weapons of mass destruction.

I would hope that, increasing the size of our troop force, along with instituting some sort of draft/national service program, would have the effect of quieting the view of war as an option of first resort. If more, or better yet, most Americans had some literal "skin in the game," maybe they would understand that even a troubling event such as (horror of horrors!) a nuclear Iran don't lend themselves well to a military solution.

A larger troop force would also be better suited to enforcing the policies that seem to need military action, such as policing the crises in Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur.

Finally, a weaning away from the futuristic, evermore destructive weaponry, combined with aggressive, verifiable reductions in large arms worldwide, woud walk us back from the brink of annihilation we've been poised at for the last half-century.

This is a quibble with an otherwise excellent post. It just seems that spending our military budget on troops and training instead of nuclear bunker-busters is a way to appear hawkish without ratcheting up our ability to wreak havoc on an increasingly massive scale.

and furthermore this "spent bullet" concept perpetuates the myth that Alderman and many espouse: Nader shot his wad at our expense.

Flags are bits of coulored cloth that governments use to first, shrink wrap people's brain's and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead....Arundhati Roy

You have trouble telling black from white as well?

Iran has a perfect right to develop its own nukes and a compelling self-interest to do so. Said self-interest is to acquire the insulation from external assault that North Korea and Israel enjoy.

While the perception of an Iranian interest in developing nuclear weapons may be understandable, Iran does not have the right to develop nuclear weapons. It is a signatory to the NPT and has pledged not to develop these weapons. The goal of the international community should be to persuade Iran that its long term interests lie in preserving its adherence to the NPT, despite potential short term temptations to go in another direction.

That said, it is very hard to convince states to uphold their weapons treaty obligations when other powerful and antagonistic countries are practicing a policy of preventive intervention and foreign regime change.

The United States is also in a terrible position to be a forceful advocate for adherence to the NPT so long as the US is moving in reverse with regard to its own NPT obligations. At this point, the main basis for the US appeal to other countries on the Iran situation mainly rests on immediate-term considerations of the separate national power and security interests of the cooperating countries. That approach may be a short-term winner, but it's a long term loser, as perceptions of national interest are constantly shifting. Subjecting the cause of non-proliferation to transient coalitions of agreeable states means to hold them hostage to interstate rivalries and changing power-balancing aims.

I really wish Democrats could get themselves in the habit of addressing these issues within the context of international law, and the network of existring international treaties and mutual commitments that our forbears have worked so hard to negotiate and enact, in their efforts to preserve the peace and save mankind from the scourge of war. So many Americans, from both parties, seem to have internalized the right-wing's traditional and reflexive anti-internationlism, exceptionalism and sovereignty-obsession.

Multilateralism is not enough. A preference for catch-as-catch-can multilateral coalitions is not genuine internationalism. A visionary internationalist policy commits itself to the propogation of the instruments and institutions of global governance, always striving to enhance the strength and credibility of those international legal arrangements which already exists, and bring the centuries-long hopes and aspirations for an international rule law to a continued flowering in reality.

Non-proliferation and related issues should be a huge issue for Democrats. I hope Democrats press their candidates to answer these sorts of questions: What is their position on the current US nuclear posture? On missile defense? On battlefield nuclear weapons? On space weapons? How do they understand US obligations under the NPT? Are they personally committed to these obligations? How do they intend to restore US credibility and leadership in global non-proliferation?

I think you confuse "right" with "obligation under terms of a treaty". Of course Iran has a right. It has a right to renounce the entire signed treaty. This is not something that has never been done before. The US has pulled out of numerous treaties when it has served its purposes and dragged its feet on numerous other treaty obligations (some you report). The Iranian government's primary obligation is to protect its citizenry from the real threat of American intervention. If it is in the least bit responsible it will do what is necessary toward that end. American foreign policy has not made nuclear weapons obsolete; it has increased the need for nuclear weapons. Like you I would hope that this would be changed before proliferation becomes widespread.

General Zinni, who opposed the plan used for the war with Iraq and whose plan for an invasion of Iraq orginally called for 500,000 soldier, believes the U.S. will be in Iraq for 5 to 7 more years. He told Wolf Blitzer they maybe there more as advisers but they would still be needed.

There should be a explicit debate. Does not U.S. want to take the path it took after WWI and largely disarm until Pearl Harbor. Should the U.S. really retreat and leave the world to its own devices or should it play the role only the U.S. can play, world policeman, hopefully with more global help? Does the existence of both threats to world oil supply and al Qaeda as well as the discovery that high tech militaries can destroy a lot but can hold very little mean this is the time to curtail a "boots on the ground" military.

As an aside it would also be useful to have a debate over creating an office of reconstruction. In the State Department headed by a general with a police officer as his second with engineers, teachers etc as part of the office it would be in charge of nation building. It would be designed to coordinate with U.S. and Nato military commanders, local leaders and be answerable to the President of the U.S.
Daniel A. Greenbaum

I'm thinking that the 72% of Americans who are fed up with the Commander in Chief have figured out that there is no free lunch for the global policeman.

What threat is suitably dealt with by virtue of this enormous armed force, fueled by resources greater than those of the rest of the world combined? ...There is no conceivable answer that simultaneously meets the criteria of feasibility and justification.

Taiwan. But we're not really having that discussion, because discussing it openly, as everyone recognizes, is itself a needless and destabilizing provocation.

Accumulating Peripherals

"rue the day"

Do you mean like way we "rue the day" Nader decided to undermine Al Gore's campaign for President an throw the election to Bush.

perhaps this part of Obama's foreign policy speech

Finally, if we want the world to deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia must lead by example. President Bush once said, “The United States should remove as many weapons as possible from high-alert, hair-trigger status – another unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation.” Six years later, President Bush has not acted on this promise. I will. We cannot and should not accept the threat of accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch. We can maintain a strong nuclear deterrent to protect our security without rushing to produce a new generation of warheads.

It's important to note that most things Kagan praised were taken out of context.

What is your evidence that Iran is in a dictatorship?

I hardly endorse the Administration in terms of military policy, but the numbers of nuclear weapons are reducing. It was interesting to hear the head of Strategic Command suggest recently that he was of the general opinion that fewer than 2000 nuclear weapons might be adequate; the number in the stockpile is around 6000. Yes, there are some proposals for new warhead development, which might be warranted for replacing existing weapons. Nuclear weapon subsystems do have various shelf lives, and while some are periodically overhauled, there are components whose lifetime really isn't understood. While underground testing was still being done, it was found that a large percentage of early Polaris warheads wouldn't have worked, because a glue, of all things, lost strength over time.

I would take issue that weaponry is "futuristic, evermore destructive." If anything, new weapons tend to be less destructive. I find much of the nuclear bunker buster discussion at odds with reasonably well known principles of weapons engineering, as well as a lack of a requirement. Current and reasonable-term developments in Iran don't justify them, as shown by some MIT researchers who modeled a hypothetical non-nuclear Israeli attack to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. More advanced US precision-guided (conventional) bombs, dropped from B-2 stealth bombers against which Iran would have no defense, would be even more potent.

With increasingly precise guidance, the high explosive yield of bombs is going down, because a small explosion in exactly the right place achieves the same result, with much less collateral damage, than a larger bomb. The advent of precision guided munitions largely obviated any justification for tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, there are some designs that use concrete-filled warheads, where the impact alone achieves the desired damage.

I am totally opposed to a draft/national service requirement as a deterrent to military means, based on involuntary servitude for young people with little "skin" in the political process, as opposed to getting more responsible politicians at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We will probably start with Congress acting responsibly and deliberately in authorizing military action.

At TPMcafe, I have made numerous posts dealing with details of Darfur, for which I see a military solution as incredibly unwise -- and as ineffectual as the sanctions and ICC route. Good soldiers are not good peacekeepers/police, and vice versa.

There are things that could bring great pressure on the Sudanese factions that created the problems in Darfur, although factional fighting there is showing signs of being dangerously self-sustaining. The most effective interventions, I believe, center around not sanctions, but selective investment in South Sudan.

What would a larger US force have been able to do about Rwanda? The Canadian-led forces there begged UN headquarters to let them take control of arms dumps and radio stations that were key to the genocide, but New York would not give permission. Once the fighting started, do you have any idea how many troops would be needed to have controlled the situation, and, in particular, how you would have gotten them into a landlocked country with no serious airports?

Without trying to be too cynical, if there is a rationale for a draft, it might be to get more Americans educated about military realities. Before suggesting intervention in Darfur, Rwanda, or a number of other places in Africa, I suggest a better understanding of logistics, peace enforcement (a different mission than peacekeeping), and the potential role of regional peace operations.

Ummm...at what brink of annihilation have we been posed?
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

No I meant exactly what I said. That's more of the same nonsense, Gore lost because he could not muster even a small landslide against the worst candidate the Republicans have run in my adult life.

All Nader did was run and tell the truth about the sham our national politics has become. It been said by Nader and others now and most know it to be true whether they are willing to admit it or not and that smelly polecat will never be put back in the box. Attacking Nader or those that agreed with him won't change the truths he brought to the public forum. The only good answer to the Issues he raised is serious reform starting with the Democratic Party and its unrepresentative leadership. I except nothing from Republicans who are what they have always been the party of the privileged selling soap to narrow-minded dupes.

The U.S. has now, again, become a colonialist empire. I have little faith that any Democratic candidate will dare to mention this fact. For this reason, they are all pathetic.

The facts are very clear and simple - if Nader had apologized to his Tantrum Party and dropped out of the race, Gore would have been in office and the Iraq Quagmire would never have been, while the US would not have thumbed their nose at the Kiyoto Protocol, etc. etc. etc.