Oh, I think the voters have all pretty well learned by now that nothing that does or does not happen in Palestine, Iraq, Turkey or Iran has the slightest causal dependency on either the preferences of US voters, or the campaign pronouncements of US politicians. Can anybody really believe that whether or not the US attacks Iran depends in any way on what the voters think? So it hardly matters what the cadidates say in the winter, spring, summer or fall, or where the damn puck is when the great closing pitches are made.

However, some candidates might at least gain a few minutes of good will and wan affection if they refrain from ladling out more of the usual sales mush, and sell it straight with a line like this:

We all know that this country is run by just a few thousand people, and once I am elected President I will have to take my orders from them, just as I will have to please them to get elected in the first place. So why don't we just cut the crap and go back to watching Paris and Rosie.

How's that gestalt fer ya?

Gestalt -- "lyin'" Al Gore and "flip-floppin'" John Kerry -- is created by the media.

So --- which answers to Reed's questions will the media find to be indicative of a sound, thoughtful statesmanlike foreign policy?

Reed--

Let's start at the beginning. Can we first get the candidates to start talking about reality and stop talking in sound bites? That's up to the media. They have to ask real questions--not open ended, essentially meaningless questions like yours,all of which can be answered with platitudes, but real, detailed questions that reflect actual research.

Take this: do you favor residual force deployment?

Well, you can spin that any number of ways without answering the question. At the very least the US expects to have an embassy in Iraq, and embassies are guarded by marines. The current embassy in Iraq is very big, and will need many guards. Logistical support for a bunkered slice of American life is sizable, and those convoys of goods have to be protected. And then you get to the point where you have to keep support personnel in another base somewhere, and then they have to be protected going to and from work......

Rather, ask whether the candidate was aware of the enduring bases.

Ask whether the candidate supported or voted for appropriations for those enduring bases (this is when it sucks to be a senator).

Ask what the candidate means by "redeployment."

Ask Richardson whether he will withdraw all forces before or after he negotiates security arrangements with Iran, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia (followup, if before--so what happens when one of those countries invades because Iraq has no national defense. if after--so how long do you think that will take? 4 years?)

Ask about the continued outsourcing of "security" tasks to contractors. Do they count as residual forces? Will their contracts be terminated? Will those jobs no longer exist, or will troops be necessary to do them?

For anyone who mentions "al qaeda" ask what force levels will be necessary to obtain the intelligence to identify al qaeda members.

You know, like that.

Now then there are questions,like this one, will you partition Iraq? that are fraught with a really fundamental problem that any of these people, and you, Reed, have to come to grips with, the question of just who is sovereign in Iraq.

Did anyone ever wonder how we were going to partition Czechoslovakia? Was there any debate in the US about the changes in the French Constitution regarding terms of office for the President and the prime minister?

The underlying question here for democrats is "when will Iraq be a sovereign state?" And "How will you manage a US withdrawal that leaves a sovereign Iraqi state?

To Republicans

"At the moment, Iraq is not a sovereign state, despite reiterated claims by Tony Snow and the President to the contrary. Will achieving a sovereign state in Iraq be a goal of your administration?

How will you attain that goal?

Will that eventual state have a representative government?

If so, how can you square that with the expectation that, as in Palestine, a government hostile to Israel's security interests will almost certainly be elected, almost certainly deny the US basing permissions?"

Nobody will ask such questions. And so we're going to be left with a "gestalt" just like the one the media left us with Bush--a compassionate conservative committed to bipartisanship.

I found the set of questions from Reed a bit odd, given that most people are talking simply about when the heck we're getting out.  I'd call his framing of most of the issues irrelevant, and it's silly to present it as quote-unquote straight talking. 

I'm not running down them all, but just three for samples. I thought pretty much every American policy across partisan lines favored a two-state solution to Israel and Palestine.  I didn't think it was a choice on the table for us to sanction Turkey's conquest of the part of Iraq controlled by the Kurds.  I don't see why it's up to us to partition Iraq. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

As long as global capitalism is the engine of politics America's foreign policy will be very simple; procure resources and capture markets.
If the right runs the US that cruel theorem will have the corollary of meting out aid punitively, ie. if poor countries promote sexual abstinence they receive aids prevention funds...or righteously; suppressing the sex worker trade.

I'd like to think that if the left ran the circus,
they'd educate people to be savvy about being
exploited by the right wing myth that corporate rights are equivalent to human rights. Capitalism
is an economic system not a political theory.

Connski

Being a politician is a good job - it requires little in the way of brain power but lots of bullshit. I get annoyed at what passes as "position papers". They are mostly a collection of platitudes. For example, most politicians are in favor of a fair two state solution to the Israel/Palestinian conflict. A proper position paper on just this issue would be about 750-1000 pages long with detailed street by street, GPS coordinates of the entire borders. It would include detailed security arrangements, economic plans etc. It's still up to the 2 parties to negotiate an agreement but they would have something in front of them as a take off point.

All the other issues that need to be addressed would require equally detailed position papers. Can you imagine a politician being confronted with the thousands of decisions on Iraq that need to be made without such a detailed roadmap at hand? What is the mission of our military for the next generation and how do we structure it. Social Security and Healthcare?? As circumstances change, so do position papers. They are not static but living, breathing documents.

We are in serious times and we need serious people to manage it. We seem to have given up long term planning in favor of ad hoc decisions. This means we become more reaction oriented instead of being proactive. Our response to 9/11 is a prime example of ad hoc action.

Now I know many of you will call me naive for proposing such detailed position papers because no politician will set him/herself up to be sniped at by all sides. You may be right that America is not currently ready for such a rational course. But it will not be long when events require us to be more detailed and proactive in our planning and implementation of policy.

Don't you mean "get out of Korea?"

When we are paying attention ...

Well it seemed to me that people were paying a decent amount of attention in the months leading up to the last election, and especially paying attention to the war which they have come to reject in overwhelming numbers. There was, I seem to recall, a virtual obsession with the war. The voters sent about as clear a message as the American electorate is capable of sending, threw out large numbers of incumbents, and replaced them with candidates who promised to change things.

As a reward for all of their efforts, the voters have been granted an escalation of the war.

And the party that promised changes, roused rabbles and exploited popular disaffection with the war before the election immediately began after the election to promulgate the message that it was unreasonable from the very start to imagine that a mere Congress might have the power to impede the will of the Great Chief, who exercises dictatorial control over the nation's foreign and military policies. This tyrannical perversion, we are now told, is the constitutional democratic "system" our wise and far-seeing founders established. The founders never intended, it seems, to create a legislature with the power to convert public preferences into national policy. Instead the wanted a chief executive with more power than the English king.

The party bosses have now instructed us to stop fussing about the war, turn our attentions away from all those nasty overseas problems, focus more on purely domestic problems, and to cheer on yet another quixotic election campaign - a campaign that so far that has all the substance of a parade float.

There can be no clearer demonstration of the fraudulent character of American "democracy", at least as applied to the country's external affairs, than that provided by the farcical political spectacle of the past year. So I see no reason to believe that the people who actually decide the matters of war and peace, and either will or will not opt for an assault on Iran as their own preferences dictate, need have the slightest concern about the whims of the masses and their fumblings at the ballot box.

I don't preach despair. I preach knowing your enemies. The problems with this country are clearly far more profound than can be addressed through the diversionary passtimes of routine campaign organizing and electoral politics as usual.

No. He said, "I will go to Korea."

re: There is no status quo

That's why I was so pleased to see John Edwards discipline when he was asked by Chris Matthews about his plan for Iraq. He began by saying, "If I were president today, this is what I would do." Then he got very specific. He looked very knowledgable, presidential, cautious and prepared.

Yeah, he's my guy. But Hillary and Obama also looked great, and any one of them can beat the shit out of Giuliani, who today is trying to explain why he doesn't have an Iraq plan, and why he got booted off the Iraq panel. (While Bernie Kerick is keeeping his memory alive, thank you very much.)

Please visit the Schapira blog, What we know so far ...

...and tell 'em Big Mitch sent ya!

If I remember right, Ike did say he would go to Korea, but it was in the context of ending the war.

J. McCutchen

Cordesman: President's Strategy Not Working
CSIS Draft Report Charges US Trying to Fight "Wrong War" in Iraq

Surprise ..surprise

Bush never did know who he was supposed to fight or where.