Posted 1:41 PM by Blah blah

From the World Affairs Council of N. California: please listen to the Feb. 20, 2003 radio broadcast "Target Iraq: What the Media Didn’t Tell You," speeches by Reese Erlich and Norm Solomon. Erlich says, according to lead U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, that some of what Colin Powell told the U.N. was plain wrong. Some weapons that Iraq was supposed to be hiding were actually abandoned buildings, etc. Solomon and Erlich do a great job in dissecting how the Bush Administration misuses language and is inconsistent in their logic for war.

Pro-War/Anti-War

What's my position on this war? Practically, I am mainly against the war for the horrendous economic, political, and human costs to the U.S. and the world. Economists estimate it will cost the U.S. at least "low-end, in the order of $100 billion over the next ten years. High-end, $500 billion maybe $600 billion over the next decade." See The Cost of War (The NewsHour, PBS). Also, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Bush's proposed budget will leave the U.S. with a $338 billion deficit (Dow Jones) in fiscal 2004 and $1.82 trillion in deficits over the next decade. In this extremely weak economy, who the hell can afford this?

Add that to Bush's clumsy, arrogant, and unconvincing diplomacy, he is already damaging American poiltical and business relations for years and years, as well as the whole purpose of the United Nations.

The most convincing people I have found who present an eloquent pro-war case are Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary, and Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of that excellent book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem. I read that for my modern Middle East history class at Berkeley.

Watch, on video, today's meeting of the United Nations Security Council (C-SPAN). Part 1/Part 2. Wow, I've never seen a U.N. meeting before. Maybe you guys find this all boring, but I am intrigued and inspired to see how the world tries to civilly settle its differences. Cowboy Bush so seems out of place at the refined, cultured U.N. If you don't have time, at least see the beginning of Part 2, in which British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw makes an eloquent, vigorous, and compelling case against Iraq. Straw is a fantastic speaker!

Totally Unconvincing (MSNBC): "At his press conference, Bush failed yet again to make his case for war. Here’s why....Everyone knows that war has been the president’s first choice—not his last—since at least the summer of 2002. In trying to play the reluctant sheriff, Bush cast himself in a role that rang false. He has, for months, been the eager sheriff....Bush’s problem was that he started with a war cry and had nothing to escalate to. His anger has become a kind of monotone, which seriously depletes its effectiveness....

Bush was lucky that no reporter asked him about his administration’s most recent budget request for rebuilding Afghanistan—a big fat zero. (Congress added a couple of hundred million). He seems to think we can play 52-card pickup and then simply leave the room. The same logical inconsistency applies to North Korea, which he described as a 'regional problem.' Let’s get this straight: Saddam’s potential development of nuclear weapons five or 10 years from now constitutes an imminent threat to the United States, but North Korea’s possession of them five to 10 weeks from now does not?...

The president’s deeper logical problem relates to the way he uses the bully pulpit to make an argument. His habit—on display again Thursday night—is to simply assert, assert, assert until the message sinks in. It’s as if war supporters believe that if they repeat the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection enough, people will eventually believe it."