From: Keith Elis (hagbard@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2003 - 12:03:57 MDT
Amara Graps:
> I am not sure that the U.S. government will be trusted,
> even if. It's reputation is damaged for the next many
> many years (I am guessing for a generation).
I wonder if the list would like to consider this question: Given that
the United States *has* damaged its reputation, what was its reputation
to start, and what is its reputation now? I don't think it's obvious
that the US's current reputation is any worse than the original.
In my mind, the claim that this administration has opened a frightening
new chapter in US foreign policy is a claim that may be overstated.
'Pre-emption' is nothing more than lawyer's sleight of hand. It's a
discursive trick used to justify an already agreed-upon course of action
post-hoc. It is a claim to have predicted the future with enough
certainty to justify intervention, and the prediction is not replicable
by anyone else because threat model is classified or based on classfied
intelligence. Justifying a pre-emptive strike without a smoking gun
requires your audience to believe in your voodoo. The US knows this, but
it's not the right to pre-empt threats they care about. It's the
*reputation* for pre-emptive thinking -- the serious consideration of
overwhelming responses even when the threat is inchoate -- that the US
is cultivating. In the end, the US calculates that achieving this
reputation in the eyes of the international community will have a
deterrent effect. Terrorists will lose governmental support, nations may
think twice about pursuing WMD, and so on. But in the end, it's just
deterrence, tried and true.
Keith
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