Aknauta
03-04-2003, 10:20 PM
techcentralstation.c om
Why Not Containment?
By Lee Harris 03/04/2003
Critics of the Bush administration have recently been pushing for the adoption of a strategy of containment towards Iraq, as opposed to war. Containment, they argue, is the policy that was pursued by the United States vis-à-vis the USSR in the aftermath of World War II. It worked then, so the logic goes, so why not let it work now?
But this argument is based on a fallacy. The current Bush administration is in fact following a policy of containment—the same policy that was initiated by the first Bush administration, and then carried on by the Clinton administration. And the only possible explanation for why Bush's critics fail to see this fairly obvious fact is that they simply do not understand what is involved in the concept of containment in the first place.
These critics seem to have the strange notion that containment is an alternative to actual war, when in fact it is a form of warfare—a fact recognized, however paradoxically, in the expression given to the American policy of containment when applied to the USSR—the Cold War.
But why did it work? (http://www.techcentralstati on.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?P ID=1051-250&CID=1051-030403B)
Why Not Containment?
By Lee Harris 03/04/2003
Critics of the Bush administration have recently been pushing for the adoption of a strategy of containment towards Iraq, as opposed to war. Containment, they argue, is the policy that was pursued by the United States vis-à-vis the USSR in the aftermath of World War II. It worked then, so the logic goes, so why not let it work now?
But this argument is based on a fallacy. The current Bush administration is in fact following a policy of containment—the same policy that was initiated by the first Bush administration, and then carried on by the Clinton administration. And the only possible explanation for why Bush's critics fail to see this fairly obvious fact is that they simply do not understand what is involved in the concept of containment in the first place.
These critics seem to have the strange notion that containment is an alternative to actual war, when in fact it is a form of warfare—a fact recognized, however paradoxically, in the expression given to the American policy of containment when applied to the USSR—the Cold War.
But why did it work? (http://www.techcentralstati on.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?P ID=1051-250&CID=1051-030403B)