Senor Barborito wrote:

Thank you. I don't write any of this because it amuses me, but because I'm honestly worried. As much as the left dislikes conservatives/Republicans in general, we're missing the old Bush and Reagan administrations right about now. The current administration seems much like Tony Blair's - a hijacking by a select interest group of an entire political party. Blair is acting wildly out of sync with the Labor party (imagine Gore winning the election and suddenly acting like Rumsfeld), and the members of the current administration hailing from PNAC seem to have done something similar. I honestly don't mind the current Bush so much as I mind his entire cabinet.

Lizard_King wrote:

You're absolutely right about that. Were I to speculate he didn't fully dispose of everything-everything (or so close as makes no difference once aging is factored into the equation) until the US *really* rattled the sword and UN inspectors were given unfettered access. Obviously if he's playing ball and betting his dictatorship on nothing being found, we're almost certain not to find anything. The obvious next step in the Republican handbook on small countries they wish to alter is 'have the CIA collapse their government.' The CIA are demolition experts when it comes to third world governments, and if ever a violation of 'ethics' were to be happily overlooked by the left's principle-bound intellectual middle class (the right's most strident foes), this case would certainly be the one. Certainly religious strife in Iraq was wildly exploitable, though the latter Bush would've had just cause to swear loudly about the former and his abandonment of the Iraqi rebels in Gulf War I. Most of the left, no fans of Hussein themselves thanks to his human rights violations, would've raised a glass and tipped a hat to the current administration if that course had been steered instead. Not just a method to save thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our relationships with our allies - it would've been wildly politically expedient to the Republicans to pursue this course.

When this course wasn't followed - that was the tip-off that something was up. Self-interested political groups loaded with intelligent people do not behave in especially stupid ways that wildly deviate from that self-interest unless something is very wrong. When the current administration did so, that was when I knew to start looking at this (spotted on Metafilter September 15th '02) with a little more acceptance than I otherwise would. It wasn't just especially solid - those politicians willingly signed those declarations of intent publicly viewable on the Internet - it explained the behavior being seen perfectly. Towards the end of January a convincing case had been made, and everything that followed continued to fuel that suspicion perfectly. Unlike Hilary, I don't see conservative conspiracies at every turn - but I do know that the time to get seriously concerned about the possibility is when a group of intelligent people behave in a seemingly unintelligent, uncharacteristic, and especially Orwellian manner.

Lizard_King wrote:

Dead on. The people in PNAC are behaving in an intelligent manner if the basis of their agenda is sound, but what they want runs significantly counter to typical American policy regarding intervention in foreign powers. You might call me a 'conservative' in the realm of foreign relations, much as I am regarding the 2nd Amendment. The United States had successfully countered the communist threat via the technique of third-world government implosion - now unquestionably on top, there's no reason to go about making new enemies and alienating existing allies without cause. We live in an increasingly interconnected world and terrorism is the consequence of improper behavior within it - people might resent your success or morals, but they won't kill themselves just to hurt you without damned good reason. Our old foreign relations methods took advantage of this by providing few good reasons (though we should have been more emphatic about the bin Laden threat - hindsight is 20/20) to really hate the United States. PNAC's policies will only cause an entire region rich with guerrilla warriors and suicide bombers to lash out at us further as our agenda appears more and more like a new Crusade to them.

Given all this I would contend the Afghanistan invasion was justified and that the war on Iraq was not. The Canadian government and many of our allies apparently came to a largely similar conclusion, because they were with us for the former but not the latter.

You might find the links in this post, as well as this link interesting. Admittedly, certain specific beneficial elements of other healthcare systems ought to be adopted as that report and others like it would indicate beneficial.

My question for Dean is whether this is the appropriate economic and political time for such a transition, but I don't argue the eventual necessity.