At 08:48 PM 2/25/2003 -0800 Doug Pensinger wrote:
>Oh, but the name calling was entirely constructive, don't you think? I
>mean why bother with all that diplomacy stuff when you can publicly
>brand a nation as evil and be done with it? Now that's a foreign policy
>you can sink your teeth into.
For one thing, it got the North Koreans to come clean about the nuclear
program, which was valuable in of itself.
For another, many people have criticized the Bush Administration for not
being appropriately up-front regarding what the War on Terrorism will mean
for Americans. Well, in the "axis of evil" speech, Bush did describe
exactly that - he described whom our enemy was, and how it would be a long,
difficult struggle requiring a wide variety of tactics to confront this enemy.
Indeed, even today, a great many opponents of Bush's Iraq policy accuse him
of being not tough enough on DPRK - whom they perceive as a greater threat
than Iraq.
It is a simple truth of life that in a free republic, there is a trade-off
between diplomacy and openness. In this case, President Bush may have
traded-off diplomacy for openness (although I don't know what good
diplomatic niceties are when niceities resulted in the DPRK building a
couple nuclear bombs and starting a plutonium nuclear program), but I think
that it is embarassing for people like you to so cavalierly dismiss
openness with the American people as being "worthless." Sure, dictators
may make the best diplomats, but I would hope that we wouldn't want that
for our country.
JDG
_______________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03
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