The amazing rise of the angry little doctor.

[Beet]

Well I think Dean was very brave to challenge the war as wrong, because the reason for it even to this day remains unclear, and it is a very deep testament to the problems in American society that most Americans don't seem troubled by this. However, a Republican landslide like the Democrat 1964 landslide would be very terrible and I feel as if Dean is going to be a huge problem for the Democrats, not only next year, but for the next five years if he loses the next year's election.

M, I must very strongly disagree with you. In my view, your post represents a very common problem in many Americans' thinking. They fail to distinguish between the anti-war left and the anti-American left. Who are the latter? The vast majority are foreigners and a small minority are radicals.

Who are the former? The former are mostly Americans who, believe it or not, do not actually hate themselves, or the country they live in. We see that there is something very fundamentally wrong in the way our country is going. For one thing, the level of public debate and dialogue has reached a nadir not seen since the mudslinging campaigns of the late 19th century. Maybe some of us were disturbed when a woman who suggested killing all muslim leaders and converting them to Christianity, and that liberals have been wrong about everything in the past 50 years (hmm, that would include civil rights too, wouldn't it?), goes to #1 on the NY Times list and becomes a respectable commentator. Maybe some were even more disturbed when we realized that political commentary had become little more than a 4-minute shouting match for entertainment purposes, but that these 4-minute spectacles were now shaping public opinion. Maybe some of us were a little disturbed when our President and his entire administration hammered home in a very serious manner their very serious fear that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to us, that he had WMD, and that he nuclear weapons, and, although we knew nothing about Iraq in the summer of 2002 that we did not know in October 2001 or 2000 or 1999, and although there was no connection between Saddam and 9-11, he used it to justify the first completely unprovoked offensive ground invasion in our proud nation's history. Maybe some people were a little disturbed when, after it became apparent that no WMD were to be found, the administration blew the matter off, admitting they may never be found, but did not care.

Maybe we were a little disturbed that, at a time of a global war on terror, Bush showed no regard for, and led a rift between, members of the civilized world. It was Lincoln who said, "A house divided cannot stand." He was talking about our country, but today the house is the civilized world, as opposed to the forces of terror and a few "rogue" states.

Maybe we were a little disturbed at domestic issues. Bush came in after a very close election in which he ran as a "compassionate conservative" and said "I am a uniter, not a divider". Instead, he seems to have tried to steamroller the majority of Americans who did not vote for him, and not just after 9/11. Most Americans support strong environmental regulations; Bush opposed them and pulled out of the Kyoto treaty. Most Americans saw Europe and Russia in a positive light; Bush scrapped the ABM treaty in a naked display of indifference that undermined 20 years of arms control efforts. After 9/11 he opposed a Department of Homeland security until revelations of intelligence lapses began to recieve signifcant news coverage; then he tried to take credit for it. After the collapse of Enron and Worldcom, the Bush SEC barely pursued those involved, resulting in a significant dearth of actual punishments. Bush has pushed through three huge tax cuts in three years and demoted America's budget position by some $650 billion. The majority of this money goes towards a very small minority of top income earners in the U.S. He has awarded companies connected to Vice President Cheney 'non-competitive' contracts in Iraq. He has supported massive media consolidation, despite being opposed by the public 50%-7%. Now the Republican Congress has just pushed through a Christmas list for special interests in health care, and plans to do so for energy next year and undoubtedly social security in the future.

The political situation is more polarized than ever and the power of the executive has grown more disproportionately since Nixon's imperial presidency, if even that. The American people have been led into a war of very questionable integrity. That is not a reason to vote for an anti-American. You would be hard pressed to find one in the field of candidates. But it is a reason to vote for a candidate who at least questioned the war, and who will truly be a uniter.

[Beet]

Personally I feel GWB made a mistake even making the issue be WMD, which was not the point at all- the point was fighting terror and the expansion of worldwide democracy.

The WMD could have been an issue only if there was proof that Saddam was actively trying to transfer WMD to terrorist groups. But that could be an issue with any country. Frankly neither of us knows why Bush started the war, but if it was for "liberation" and it would somehow help the Middle East, he could have come right out and said it; he did not.

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Some European governments support the Palestinians in the U.N. and rhetorically in a lopsided manner, but the U.S. isn't innocent here. We support only one party in a much more important manner-- by supplying one side with significant arms grants. Israel does not even need any more arms. That is not even their problem. I don't think the major rift between France and the U.S. really opened until the end of 2002 when Bush really wanted to go to war over this WMD issue. The French said no, because there really was no reason to go to war that wasn't already known on Sept. 12, 2001, even if you want to connect the 9/11 attacks to Iraq.

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It's nice to know that you are not totally partisan. Morality is not totally partisan, but unfortunately the most politically active people are.

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There are some people like that but again I think that in the U.S., they are not really as many as you think. There were large protests in the Iraq war-- and justifiably so-- but not against the Afghanistan war, which some 90% supported. If you asked Mr. Dean or took a poll of his active supporters, the vast majority would say they supported the Afghanistan action. Beyond that the only war the U.S. has been involved in recently was Kosovo, which was again relatively unprovoked, but to the extent that ethnic cleansing was going on/about to happen, I don't remember any protests against intervening.

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I think that both sides are morally culpable on this issue. The fact that Israel is a democracy makes it more credible in some ways than Yasser Arafat certainly. But viewed strictly from the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict, about 3 times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed. Furthermore Israel continues to expand settlements and did so throughout the 1990's... not an indication that it wants peace. All I'm trying to say that both sides can be criticized and could have handled the situation better. In that sense, they are equal.

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Yeah, the more dictators are removed, the better. "When you can you should," as Tony Blair said, I can agree with. The controversy surrounding the war in Iraq is not due to disagreement on that question but rather what Bush told the American people and the world, as well as what really distinguishes Iraq from another country, and whether it will really help anything from America's perspective. Going the dictator question alone, we should have invaded Cuba, because it is 90 miles away from our shores and would probably be even easier to overthrow than Iraq, even given what we know about how easy that was. It would probably be much much easier to occupy.

[Beet]

As to the question why Iraq and not another nation if the big issue was democracy, there are several reasons I can think of:

A possible domino effect, spreading reform across the region.

Ok, just becaue you can think of them it doesn't mean that's the story Bush told, or why he decided to lead the country into it.

Bush: "Overthrowing the Saddam regime will also have a domino effect, leading to the fall of the Syrian, Iranian, and hopefully Jordanian and Saudi governments."

Nope, he didn't say that. Nor is he particularly putting much pressure on the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, or the Pakistanis.

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Bush: "I picked Iraq to invade because that's what the rest of the Security Council wanted."

Nope.

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Bush: "Iraq is the easiest country in the world to attack."

Nope.

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Bush: "Iraq poses a threat to a lot of our allies in the Middle East."

Now here's something he did try to say. However it wasn't true. It certainly wasn't any more true in the summer of 2002 than it was in the fall of 2001 or earlier.

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Bush: "I have examined all of the world's dictatorships and concluded that Iraq's is the only one that will not fall when the dictator dies. And since Mr. Paya wants us to lift sanctions on Cuba, we will."

Nope again.