Alan Bock

In their speeches before the United Nations both President Bush and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in different ways and probably for different purposes, made a couple of mistakes that could easily come back to bite them. The chief mistake was to take UN resolutions and statements by diplomats and political leaders too seriously, too … Continue reading “Don’t Take the UN Too Seriously”

Do you believe President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that there are new reports suggesting that Saddam Hussein is getting somewhat close to being able to manufacture a nuclear weapon, or do you believe the International Atomic Energy Agency, which says it has no such evidence? In terms of justifying an attack on Iraq, it … Continue reading “Preventive or Preemptive War?”

Perhaps the most striking thing about the current discussion/ debate/ PR campaign about the possibility of the United States launching a pre-emptive strike against Iraq is the weakness of the arguments in favor of an attack – even if one accepts the premise that a pre-emptive strike is sometimes justified, necessary or desirable. Leaving open … Continue reading “Weak Arguments for Attack”

I can’t claim to know whether the Washington Post story was an intentional leak or represented enterprising reporting. But the news that lawyers for the Bush administration believe that a 1991 congressional resolution authorizing President Bush’s father to wage war in the Persian Gulf provides ongoing legal justification for the current administration to launch an … Continue reading “Bush Cutting Legal Corners: A Wartime Pattern”

We’re still not seeing anything close to a full debate, let alone any signal that anybody in a position to make it stick will demand a formal congressional declaration of war before the United States attacks Iraq. But a few skeptics and even opponents of a unilateral attack are beginning to come out of the … Continue reading “Choosing Up Sides”

Although the Senate hearings on a possible American attack on Iraq were generally disappointing, an inclination to ask questions does seem to have surfaced as the possibility of such a war becomes more imminent. Certainly the comments from House Majority Leader Dick Armey about the inadvisability of attacking a country without a substantial justification for … Continue reading “Invasion Complications”

One expects a certain amount of corner-cutting on both procedures and concern for civil liberties during time of war. That’s one of the main reasons some of us prefer to avoid war when at all possible, because we know that government power will grow and citizen liberty will suffer. War, as Randolph Bourne explained so … Continue reading “U.S. Government Behaving Badly”

It’s not so much that the details of the Bush plan are faultier than some other plan some other leader might have devised. The bigger question is why an American president who upon assuming office seemed to understand that American micromanagement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a losing game is now so eager to impose … Continue reading “Bush: Planning in the Whirlwind”

Most of the administration’s paper grandly proclaiming a "National Strategy for Homeland Security" is the kind of innocuous bureaucratic blather one finds in a report on waste management or wetlands maintenance. I’m not sure whether it’s alarming or reassuring to be confronted by such soporific sentences as "This is an exceedingly complex mission that requires … Continue reading “Homeland Security Horrors”

It is important to remember, as quaint as such concerns might seem in many quarters, that so far Saddam Hussein has failed to give the United States a clear-cut casus belli to justify what is beginning to look like an almost-certain U.S. attack on his regime in Iraq. The last time – perhaps encouraged by … Continue reading “Mixed Signals on Iraq?”