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Page: Bartashevitch-Foster Neg
Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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Valley | 2 | Edina RM | Zachary Hills |
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Valley | 3 | Iowa City WW | Dustin Myers-Levy |
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SPC BF Neg--Round 2 ValleyTournament: Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Edina RM | Judge: Zachary Hills
The term ‘engagement’ was popularised in the early 1980s amid controversy about the Reagan administration’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards South Africa. However, the term itself remains a source of confusion. Except in the few instances where the US has sought to isolate a regime or country, America arguably ‘engages’ states and actors all the time simply by interacting with them. To be a meaningful subject of analysis, the term ‘engagement’ must refer to something more specific than a policy of ‘non-isolation’. As used in this article, ‘engagement’ refers to a foreign-policy strategy which depends to a significant degree on positive incentives to achieve its objectives. Certainly, it does not preclude the simultaneous use of other foreign-policy instruments such as sanctions or military force: in practice, there is often considerable overlap of strategies, particularly when the termination or lifting of sanctions is used as a positive inducement. Yet the distinguishing feature of American engagement strategies is their reliance on the extension or provision of incentives to shape the behaviour of countries with which the US has important disagreements. 2. Violation – affirmative is a negative increase of incentives, they take legislation away. 3. Explods limits – is functionally effectually topical, allows repealing of hundreds of individual bits of legislation we can’t link to. 4. Wide limits kill neg ground. K American Hegemonic Dominance is Based On the Idea that Deep Down, Everyone in the World is an American Begging For American Style Democracy—Ultimately This Logic Justifies the Demonization of Opposition and Justifies All Violence in the Name of America Americans have historically seen their role in the world in altruistic terms. “We just try to be good,” they say, “to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return.” In fact, movies such as John Ford's The Searchers and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver or books like Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which provide fundamental insight into the naive benevolence of Americans, have never been more relevant than with today's global U.S. ideological offensive. As Greene said about his American protagonist, who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western freedom to the Vietnamese, only to see his intentions totally misfire: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” The supposition underlying these good intentions is that underneath our skins, we are all Americans. If that is humanity's true desire, then all that Americans need to do is to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will embrace America's ideological dream. No wonder the United States has moved from “containing” the enemy to promoting a “capitalist revolution,” as Stephen Schwartz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies put it in February 2003. The United States is now, as the defunct Soviet Union was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. But when Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union message, “The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity,” this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easier if freedom effectively were to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity, and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity. The Affirmative’s Logic Assigns to China Something We Cannot Access or Understand, Something in Them “More than Themselves”—This is the Basis for Racism and Hatred, a Structure That Inevitably Results in Total Violence Our argument can be briefly summarized as follows: the outbreak of "real" violence is conditioned by a symbolic deadlock. Real violence is a kind of acting out that emerges when the symbolic fiction that guarantees the life of a community is in danger. There is, however, a feature with regard to which the example of the Amazon gold diggers differs from the first two: in the first two examples, the disturbed fiction was a publicly unacknowledged, shadowy, obscene agency (Kafka's Court, the sailors' obscene initiation rituals), whereas in the Amazon gold-digger community the disturbance affected the symbolic fiction that determines the very structure of public authority. The best way to elaborate this crucial difference is to approach the problem from the other end: what is the target of the outbursts of violence? What are we aiming at, what do we endeavor to annihilate when we exterminate Jews or beat up foreigners in our cities? The first answer that offers itself again involves symbolic fiction: is not, beyond direct physical pain and personal humiliation, *1518 the ultimate aim of the rapes in the Bosnian war, for example, to undermine the fiction (the symbolic narrative) that guarantees the coherence of the Muslim community? Is not a consequence of extreme violence also that "the story the community has been telling itself about itself no longer makes sense" (to paraphrase Richard Rorty n8 )? This destruction of the enemy's symbolic universe, this "culturocide," however, is in itself not sufficient to explain an outburst of ethnic violence - its ultimate cause (in the sense of driving force) is to be sought at a somewhat deeper level. What does our "intolerance" towards foreigners feed on? What is it that irritates us about them and disturbs our psychic balance? Already at the level of a simple phenomenological description, the crucial characteristic of this cause is that it cannot be pinpointed to some clearly defined observable property: although we usually can enumerate a series of features that annoy us with "them" (the way they laugh too loudly, the bad smell of their food, etc.), these features function as indicators of a more radical strangeness. Foreigners may look and act like us, but there is some unfathomable je ne sais quoi, something "in them more than themselves" that makes them "not quite human" ("aliens" in the precise sense this term acquired in the science fiction films of the fifties). Our relationship to this unfathomable traumatic element that "bothers us" in the Other is structured in fantasies (about the Other's political and/or sexual omnipotence, about "their" strange sexual practices, about their secret hypnotic powers, etc.). Jacques Lacan baptized this paradoxical uncanny object that stands for what in the perceived positive, empirical object necessarily eludes my gaze and as such serves as the driving force of my desiring it, objet petit a, the object-cause of desire; n9 another name for it is plus-de-jouir, the "surplus-enjoyment" that designates the excess over the satisfaction brought about by the positive, empirical properties of the object. At its most radical level, violence is precisely an endeavor to strike a blow at this unbearable surplus-enjoyment contained in the Other. Since hatred is thus not limited to the "actual properties" of its object but targets its real kernel, objet a, what is "in the object more than itself," the object of hatred is stricto sensu indestructible: the more we destroy the object in reality, the more powerful its sublime kernel rises in front of us. This paradox has already *1519 emerged apropos of the Jews in Nazi Germany: the more they were ruthlessly exterminated, the more horrifying were the dimensions acquired by the remainder... The Fantasies Created By the Affirmative Structure are Ultimately False, The Response To Such Failures is the Inevitable Violence Which Attempts to Bridge the Gap Between the Everyday World and the Belief Which Undermines The Affirmative As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, "really-existing men" are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new - the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: "man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man." We have here the tension between the series of "ordinary" elements ("ordinary" men as the "material" of history) and the exceptional "empty" element (the socialist "New Man," which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man's essence, "alienated" in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is - the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past. One should formulate here things in a very precise way: the reason why the Stalinist fury of purification is so destructive resides in the very fact that it is sustained by the belief that, after the destructive work of purification will be accomplished, SOMETHING WILL REMAIN, the sublime "indivisible remainder," the paragon of the New. It is in order to conceal the fact that there is nothing beyond that, in a strictly perverse way, the revolutionary has to cling to violence as the only index of his authenticity, and it is as this level that the critics of Stalinism as a rule misperceive the cause of the Communist's attachment to the Party. Say, when, in 1939-1941 pro-Soviet Communists twice had to change their Party line overnight (after the Soviet-German pact, it was imperialism, not, Fascism, which was elevated to the role of the main enemy; from June 22 1941, when Germany attacked Soviet Union, it was again the popular front against the Fascist beast), the brutality of the imposed changes of position was what attracted them. Along the same lines, the purges themselves exerted an uncanny fascination, especially on intellectuals: their "irrational" cruelty served as a kind of ontological proof, bearing witness to the fact that we are dealing with the Real, not just with empty plans - the Party is ruthlessly brutal, so it means business... Our Alternative is To Reject the Idea Implicit in the Affirmative that One Must Identify Within the Boundaries of the System. By Choosing the Third Way Politics Refuses to Acknowledge, We Realign Our Symbolic Fantasies with the Ethics of the Real, Rupturing the Fantasy We Have Chosen to Call Reality and Creating New Possibilities. Zizek is concerned to confront this alibi head on and to oppose it with an ethics of the Real (see also Zupancic, 2000). This is an ethics in which we assume responsibility for our own actions and our inscription within the broader life-world up to and including the construction of socio-economic reality. This is not to embrace any kind of carte blanche approach to reality. The point is rather that we should address the full implications of the way in which our reality is reproduced in human terms and not as a cosmic order. We cannot hide behind terms like "globalisation", "pragmatism", "economic reality", "rationality" and so on, as if they described a neutral ontological order. On the contrary, we are obliged to confront the way in which such terms attempt to ideologically disguise the artificial nature of reality (this grimace of the Real) and, on that very basis, to make real (Real) ethical decisions: i.e. decisions that begin from the position that genuine transformation is always possible and always involves this traumatic dimension of the Real; this dimension of rupture with existing symbolic structures. An ethics of the Real is not one of accepting impossibility in the sense of an indefinite ideal, but is rather one that entreats us to risk the impossible: to break out of the bonds of existing possibility. This opens the way to what Zizek refers to as the act and to overcome the symbolic mortification associated with the ideological-cynical attitude that revolves around, a fetishized notion of absolute reality. The Third Wayist perspective, for example, is largely stupefied by its master signifier "globalisation" and is consequently unable to mount any real challenge to the basic power structures. Global (capitalist) reality is in place, so it is chiefly a question of adjustment and of adopting a mature-pragmatic attitude. Politics is reduced to a repetitive logic of deliberation rather than active resistance; a politics of conformism towards a determinate order of reality rather than a reconfiguration of that reality. Like Hamlet, Third Wayism remains transfixed by the spectre of impossibility (the global Thing) and this renders it incapable of risking the impossible; of passing to the act. Zizek's thought is concerned crucially to reactivate the dimension of the miraculous in political endeavour. For Zizek the miracle is that which coincides with trauma in the sense that it involves a fundamental moment of symbolic disintegration (2001b: 86). This is the mark of the act: a basic rupture in the weave of reality that opens up new possibilities and creates the space for a reconfiguration of reality itself. Like the miracle, the act is ultimately unsustainable - it cannot be reduced to, or incorporated directly within, the symbolic order. Yet it is through the act that we touch (and are touched by) the Real in such a way that the bonds of our symbolic universe are broken and that an alternative construction is enabled; reality is transformed in a Real sense. XO XOs cut through partisanship to promote progressive goals, often catalyze congress and result in legislation In this type of a situation, when entrenched interests and shortsightedness have bogged down policymaking, Presidential action can promote progressive change and justice. Thomas Jefferson issued an Executive Order in 1803 to complete the Louisiana Purchase; President Lincoln issued an Executive Order in 1863 to free the slaves (an action later known as the “Emancipation Proclamation”); President Truman used an Executive Order to force the racial integration of the armed forces; President Eisenhower used one to force all federal contractors to post public notice of their nondiscrimination in hiring; Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used Executive Orders to require affirmative action in federal contracting and to ban racial discrimination in federal housing; and President Nixon used an Executive Order to create the EPA. In each of these circumstances, Executive Orders were used to cut through partisanship and implement important and needed changes. Furthermore, such Executive Orders often catalyzed media and public attention to the degree that they later persuaded Congress to endorse with eventual legislation. Bruce N. Reed, a special advisor to President Clinton, put it succinctly by stating that “in our experience, when the administration takes executive action, it not only leads to results while the political process is stuck in neutral, but it often spurs Congress to follow suit.” Analogously, Executive Orders, notes two political scientists, “facilitate innovations in the legislative process, codify ideological commitments, and drive social change.” XO solves best- 5 reasons France and the United States have presidential systems which give their nations’ highest elected official wide powers to conduct foreign and security policy. To different degrees, the division of responsibilities for both nations’ highest office reflects Wildavsky’s concept of “two-presidencies” in which one facet represents domestic policy and one represents foreign policy.1 In writing about the U.S. chief executive, Wildavsky summarized contemporary scholarship on the foreign policy powers of the presidency and identified five main reasons for the concentration of power: 1) since foreign policy and security issues often need “fast action”, the executive rather than the legislative branch of government is the more appropriate decision-making structure; 2) the Constitution grants the president broad formal powers; 3) because of the complexities involved voters tend to delegate to the president their “trust and confidence” to act; 4) the “interest group structure is weak, unstable and thin”; and 5) the legislature follows a “self-denying ordinance” since tradition and practicality reinforce the power of the chief executive.2 Wildavsky’s work is echoed by many scholars, including Logan, who contends that in Western democracies, “the mass public consciously or unconsciously cedes influence” to politicians and policy elites.3 Counterplan increases presidential power—Congress will fail to take it back Presidential power has expanded over time as presidents have asserted new prerogatives and built on the precedents of their predecessors. We have seen this in the areas of presidential commitment of troops, executive orders, and impoundments, to name a few. Presidents push, and when Congress fails to respond to the expansion of power, subsequent presidents take it as accepted precedent and build on it. Strong presidency key to solving terror, nuclear war, and economy A central question during the 1970s was whether, in the wake of a somewhat diminished presidency, Congress could furnish the necessary leadership to govern the country. Most people, including many members of Congress, did not think Congress could play that role. The routine answer as we enter the twenty-first century is that the United States needs a presidency of substantial power, if we are to solve the trade, deficit, productivity, and other economic and national security problems we currently face. We live in a continuous state of emergency. Terrorism or nuclear warfare could destroy our country. Global competition of almost every sort highlights the need for swift leadership and a certain amount of efficiency in government. Many people realize, too, that weakening the presidency may, as often as not, strengthen the vast federal bureaucracy and its influence over how programs are implemented more than it would strengthen Congress. Congress simply is not structured for sustained leadership and direction. Power in Congress is too fragmented and dispersed. Congress can, on occasion, provide leadership on various issues, yet it is far less able to adapt to changing demands and antional or international crises that arise than is the presidency. The presidency is a more fluid situation and thereby can usually more quickly adjust and adapt. DA Obama is focused on financial issues – political capital will be key and is working now There’s a simple reason President Barack Obama is using his bully pulpit to focus the nation’s attention on the battle over the budget: In this fight, he’s watching Republicans take swings at each other. And that GOP fight is a lifeline for an administration that had been scrambling to gain control its message after battling congressional Democrats on the potential use of military force in Syria and the possible nomination of Larry Summers to run the Federal Reserve. If House Republicans and Obama can’t cut even a short-term deal for a continuing resolution, the government’s authority to spend money will run out on Oct. 1. Within weeks, the nation will default on its debt if an agreement isn’t reached to raise the federal debt limit. For some Republicans, those deadlines represent a leverage point that can be used to force Obama to slash his health care law. For others, they’re a zero hour at which the party will implode if it doesn’t cut a deal. Meanwhile, “on the looming fiscal issues, Democrats — both liberal and conservative, executive and congressional — are virtually 100 percent united,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). Just a few days ago, all that Obama and his aides could talk about were Syria and Summers. Now, they’re bringing their party together and shining a white hot light on Republican disunity over whether to shut down the government and plunge the nation into default in a vain effort to stop Obamacare from going into effect. The squabbling among Republicans has gotten so vicious that a Twitter hashtag — #GOPvsGOPugliness — has become a thick virtual data file for tracking the intraparty insults. Moderates, and even some conservatives, are slamming Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite, for ramping up grassroots expectations that the GOP will shut down the government if it can’t win concessions from the president to “defund” his signature health care law. “I didn’t go to Harvard or Princeton, but I can count,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) tweeted, subtly mocking Cruz’s Ivy League education. “The defunding box canyon is a tactic that will fail and weaken our position.” While it is well-timed for the White House to interrupt a bad slide, Obama’s singular focus on the budget battle is hardly a last-minute shift. Instead, it is a return to the narrative arc that the White House was working to build before the Syria crisis intervened. And it’s so important to the president’s strategy that White House officials didn’t consider postponing Monday’s rollout of the most partisan and high-stakes phase even when a shooter murdered a dozen people at Washington’s Navy Yard that morning. The basic storyline, well under way over the summer, was to have the president point to parts of his agenda, including reducing the costs of college and housing, designed to strengthen the middle class; use them to make the case that he not only saved the country from economic disaster but is fighting to bolster the nation’s finances on both the macro and household level; and then argue that Republicans’ desire to lock in the sequester and leverage a debt-ceiling increase for Obamacare cuts would reverse progress made. The president is on firm ground, White House officials say, because he stands with the public in believing that the government shouldn’t shut down and that the country should pay its bills. Plan destroys Obama’s credibility – makes it impossible for him to get anything through Congress Unless President Obama can totally change a reluctant public's perception of another Middle-Eastern conflict, it seems unlikely that he can get 218 votes in the House, though he can probably still squeak out 60 votes in the Senate. This defeat would be totally unprecedented as a President has never lost a military authorization vote in American history. To forbid the Commander-in-Chief of his primary power renders him all but impotent. At this point, a rebuff from the House is a 67-75 probability. I reach this probability by looking within the whip count. I assume the 164 declared "no" votes will stay in the "no" column. To get to 218, Obama needs to win over 193 of the 244 undecided, a gargantuan task. Within the "no" column, there are 137 Republicans. Under a best case scenario, Boehner could corral 50 "yes" votes, which would require Obama to pick up 168 of the 200 Democrats, 84. Many of these Democrats rode to power because of their opposition to Iraq, which makes it difficult for them to support military conflict. The only way to generate near unanimity among the undecided Democrats is if they choose to support the President (recognizing the political ramifications of a defeat) despite personal misgivings. The idea that all undecided Democrats can be convinced of this argument is relatively slim, especially as there are few votes to lose. In the best case scenario, the House could reach 223-225 votes, barely enough to get it through. Under the worst case, there are only 150 votes. Given the lopsided nature of the breakdown, the chance of House passage is about one in four. While a failure in the House would put action against Syria in limbo, I have felt that the market has overstated the impact of a strike there, which would be limited in nature. Rather, investors should focus on the profound ripple through the power structure in Washington, which would greatly impact impending battles over spending and the debt ceiling. Currently, the government loses spending authority on September 30 while it hits the debt ceiling by the middle of October. Markets have generally felt that Washington will once again strike a last-minute deal and avert total catastrophe. Failure in the Syrian vote could change this. For the Republicans to beat Obama on a President's strength (foreign military action), they will likely be emboldened that they can beat him on domestic spending issues. Until now, consensus has been that the two sides would compromise to fund the government at sequester levels while passing a $1 trillion stand Obama is key to avoid shutdown that kills the economy and hegemony Then there is the overload of business on the congressional agenda when the two houses return on Sept. 9 -with only nine legislative days scheduled for action in the month. We have serious confrontations ahead on spending bills and the debt limit, as the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and the debt ceiling approaches just a week or two thereafter. Before the news that we would drop everything for an intense debate on whether to strike militarily in Syria, Congress-watchers were wondering how we could possibly deal with the intense bargaining required to avoid one or more government shutdowns and/or a real breach of the debt ceiling, with devastating consequences for American credibility and the international economy. Beyond the deep policy and political divisions, Republican congressional leaders will likely use both a shutdown and the debt ceiling as hostages to force the president to cave on their demands for deeper spending cuts. Avoiding this end-game bargaining will require the unwavering attention of the same top leaders in the executive and legislative branches who will be deeply enmeshed i/n the Syria debate. The possibility -even probability -of disruptions caused by partial shutdowns could complicate any military actions. The possibility is also great that the rancor that will accompany the showdowns over fiscal policy will bleed over into the debate about America and Syria. China 1) Chinese war would not go nuclear Jeffrey Record (Professor of Strategy and International Security at the Air War College) 01 “Thinking about China and War”, http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj01/win01/record.html#record Assuming the absence of mindless escalation to a general nuclear exchange, a war between China and the United States would be constrained by limited military capacity and political objectives. For openers, neither China nor the United States is capable of invading and subjugating the other, and even if the United States had the ability to do so, avoidance of a land war on the Asian mainland has long been an injunction of American strategy. The objectives of a Sino-American war over Taiwan or freedom of navigation in the South China Sea would be limited—just as they were in the Sino-American war in Korea. And since the outcome in either case would be decided by naval and air forces, with regular ground forces relegated to a distinctly secondary role, a war over Taiwan or the South China Sea would also be limited in terms of the type of force employed. This was not the case in the Korean War, in which ground combat dominated. (To be sure, the US position on the ground would have been untenable without air dominance.) SECOND, If nuclear escalation occurred the US would decapitate Chinese nuclear forces before China could use them – no risk of bilateral escalation Hans Kristensen et al (Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists) 06 “Chinese Nuclear Forces and U.S. Nuclear War Planning”, November, Pg. 2-3 Our principal finding is that the Chinese-U.S. nuclear relationship is dramatically disproportionate in favor of the United States and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Although the United States has maintained extensive nuclear strike plans against Chinese targets for more than a half century, China has never responded by building large nuclear forces of its own and is unlikely to do so in the future. As a result, Chinese nuclear weapons are quantitatively and qualitatively much inferior to their U.S. counterparts: China’s total stockpile numbers around 200 warheads; the United States has nearly 10,000. By 2015, after China deploys a new generation of ballistic missiles and the United States has completed its planned reductions, China may have some 220 warheads and the United States more than 5,000. China has about 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the continental United States; the United States has more than 830 missiles – most with multiple warheads – that can reach China. By 2015, when the U.S. intelligence community projects China will have 75 missiles primarily targeted against the United States, the U.S. force will include 780 land- and sea-based missiles. None of China’s long-range nuclear forces are believed to be on alert; most U.S. ballistic missiles are on high alert ready to launch within minutes after receiving a launch order. By 2015, unlike today, some of China’s long-range missiles presumably might deploy with their warheads mated but be incapable of quickly launching on warning. China’s sole nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) has never gone on patrol. As a result, the crews of the new Jin-class (Type 094) SSBNs currently under construction will need to start almost from scratch to develop the operational and tactical skills and procedures that are essential if a sea-based deterrent is to be militarily effective and matter strategically. In comparison, U.S. SSBNs have conducted more than 3,600 deterrent patrols over the past 55 years. In 2005, the United States conducted 44 patrols, more than four times the number of SSBN patrols conducted by all other nuclear weapon states combined. China may be able to build two or three new SSBNs over the next decade, but they would be highly vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine forces; the U.S. Navy has 14 SSBNs and has moved the majority of them into the Pacific, where they operate with impunity. China may have a small number of aircraft with a secondary nuclear capability, but they would be severely tested by U.S. and allied air defense systems or in air-to-air combat. The United States operates 72 long-range bombers assigned missions with nuclear gravity bombs and land-attack cruise missiles. China does not have nuclear cruise missiles, although the U.S. intelligence community suspects it might develop such a capability in the future. The United States has more than 1,000 nuclear cruise missiles for delivery by aircraft and attack submarines. THIRD--Modernization Owen Harries (Think tank, Author, and Editor of the National Interest) 02 China in the National Interest, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 0-7658-0561-8, p. 248 The strategic costs to China of a war with the United States are only part of the deterrence equation. China also possesses vital economic interests in stable relations with the United States. War would end China's quest for modernization by severely constraining its access to U.S. markets, capital, and technology, and by requiring China to place its economy on permanent wartime footing. The resultant economic reversal would derail China's quest for "comprehensive national power" and great power status./ Serious economic instability would also destabilize China's political system on account of the break down of social order. Both would probably impose insurmountable challenges to party leadership. Moreover, defeat in a war with the United States over Taiwan would impose devastating nationalistic humiliation on the Chinese Communist Party. In all, the survival of the party depends on preventing a Sino-America war. B) Continued Chinese modernization will collapse U.S. Hegemony Meghan O’Connell (Writer for UPI News) June 22 06 “China Threatens to Rival American Power Status”, http://www.spacewar.com/reports/China_Threatens_To_Rival_American_Power_Status.html China's rapid military expansion over recent years has sparked concern amongst American officials that its battlefield capabilities may eventually pose a threat to U.S. dominance. Experts recently met at the Heritage Foundation to discuss the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review and its implications for the U.S. strategy with China. The Pentagon report states, "Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional U.S. military advantages... The pace and scope of China's military build-up already puts regional military balances at risk." Chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Larry Wortzel said, "The United States and Western countries in general face a concerted effort on the part of the Chinese military to build this new defense infrastructure, and they're pretty good at it." Military modernization in China has accelerated since the 1990s. China has increased its defense spending by more than 10 percent in real terms every year except 2003 since 1996, the defense review says. China's stated defense budget for 2006 increased by 15 percent from last year to $35 billion. However, the Pentagon report says that the actual budget is between $70 billion and $135 billion dollars. But China lagged far behind the United States in the CIA's estimates of each country's military expenditures in 2005. The CIA estimates the United States spent over $518 billion last year, while China's estimated total hovered around $81 billion. China cannot realistically catch up with the U.S. military budget, said Wang Yuan-kang, a professor at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute. And America remains a larger economic force. "China does not like American troops at its footsteps," Wang said, "and it wants to have a multi-power world but it cannot do it now because the United States is simply too powerful." But the gap between America's dominance and China's power seems to be lessening. The debate is no longer about whether China has the military strength to pose a threat, but what to do about it, said Daniel Blumenthal, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. "China is probably the only country in the world that can compete with the United States militarily and actually pose a challenge to its hege/mony," Blumenthal said, pointing to what he called a serious peacetime military buildup by China over the last 10 years. The United States has been shoring up its alliances around the region, he continued, with countries such as Japan, India, Vietnam and Mongolia all concerned about what China's military rise means. Because of the nation's military expansion, intervention should China attack Taiwan can no longer be accomplished at a low cost, said Randall Schriver, former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. And though China has been bulking up its military presence along borders near Taiwan, Schriver said that the nation's vision extends far beyond the small island to regional and global contingencies. "The game is on in Asia, and the United States has to be engaged," Schriver said, emphasizing the growing global importance of Asia. According to the National Intelligence Council, Schriver said, by 2020, Asia will hold 56 percent of the world's population, six of the 10 largest militaries, three of the four largest economies, and six of the 10 largest energy consumers. By contrast, Schriver added, the NIC expects the population of the Middle East to compose only 4 percent of the world's total in 2020. "The whole center of gravity of the earth and human existence is moving to Asia," Schriver said, explaining that the United States needs a policy that will develop relations with the rest of Asia while confronting China. You get Asia right by getting China right and you get China right by getting Asia right, Schriver said. Yet in an age of globalization, any moves by China or the United States would have grand influence in areas beyond the military. "Economic setbacks and crises of confidence could slow China's emergence as a full-scale great power," the National Intelligence Council wrote in its 2020 Project report on global trends for the future. "Beijing's failure to maintain its economic growth would itself have a global impact." C) U.S. hegemony is key to prevent global nuke war Zalmay Khalilzad (Senior Policy analyst at the RAND Institute) 95 "Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War", Spring Washington Quarterly Under the third option, the United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange. U.S. leadership would therefore be more conducive to global stability than a bipolar or a multipolar balance of power system. FOURTH, war with China is inevitable – quick war now is better than a massive war in the long-term JR Nyquist (Former Contractor in Soviet/Russian Analysis Group for U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency) 05 China’s war preparations are deliberate, and the implications should not be passed over lightly. China is a highly secretive country, like all communist countries. The objective of communism is world revolution, the overthrow of global capitalism, the destruction of the free market, the elimination of the international bourgeoisie and the disarming of the United States. We should be puzzled, indeed, if Chinese policy did not follow the communist line (however deviously). Given all this, it is difficult to account for the dismissive attitude of U.S. intelligence experts when regarding Chinese intentions. The China problem is a serious one. “The people … of the countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America should unite,” said Chairman Mao in 1964. “The people of all continents should unite … and so form the broadest united front to oppose the U.S. imperialist policies of aggression and war and to defend world peace.” In terms of today’s peace movement, Mao’s sentiments are up-to-date. They are, I think, a founding inspiration. The supposed “death of communism” may have eliminated a few soiled terms, but not the main idea. The label on old hatreds may be changed, but the content remains the same. And because America is asleep, and the market is buzzing with Chinese goods, the U.S. government has turned a blind eye. The truth about China is worse than inconvenient. It is painful. So a special context has been devised for dismissing inconvenient facts. This context is inculcated at graduate schools, think tanks and in government. The context for understanding international affairs must not admit the existence of a coordinated, secretive and dangerous combination of countries motivated to overthrow the United States. In other words, the existence of a “communist bloc” cannot be admitted. And China’s role within this bloc – above all – must be rated as a “crackpot notion.” And yet, the existence of something identical to the old communist bloc – whatever we choose to call it – is indicated by actions across the board by Russia, the East European satellite countries, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and China. Some ideas fall from fashion. But truth is always true, fashion or not. U.S. experts failed to connect the dots regarding China’s development of a long-range cruise missile, a new attack submarine, new ground-to-air missiles, a new anti-ship missile (for sinking U.S. aircraft carriers) and more. China is preparing for war against the United States, specifically. As absurd as it sounds to the economic optimists who think trade with China guarantees peace, the U.S. and China are bound to collide. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t have a sense of history, doesn’t understand communist thinking or the overall policy Beijing has consistently followed since 1949. Communist countries periodically experiment with capitalism, they always seek trade with the West, and they always sink the money and technology they gain thereby into a military buildup. Ultimately, they don’t care about the prosperity of their people, the state of the national infrastructure, personal or press freedom. Some believe that we mustn’t say that China is a threat. Such a statement would be akin to self-fulfilling prophecy. But an honest appreciation of Chinese actions should not be disallowed by an appeasing diplomacy or wishful thinking. The job of the analyst is not to guarantee good relations with countries that are preparing for destructive war. The job of the analyst is to see war preparations, diplomatic maneuvers and economic policies and draw a common sense conclusion about them. If world peace depends on hiding China’s military buildup, then world peace is like your fat uncle dressed in a Santa Claus suit. Saying it’s your fat uncle may ruin Christmas for your little sister, but Santa Claus isn’t a real person – and never will be. FIFTH, War with China NOW is key to stimulate the U.S. economy Paul Watson and Yihan Dai (Analyst for Infowars and Chinese Translator for Infowars) October 30 08 “RAND Lobbies Pentagon: Start War to Save U.S. Economy” http://www.infowars.com/?p=5654) According to reports out of top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession. A fierce debate has now ensued in China about who that foreign power may be, with China itself as well as Russia and even Japan suspected to be the targets of aggression. The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets. The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations. Current directors of RAND include Frank Charles Carlucci III, former Defense Secretary and Deputy Director of the CIA, Ronald L. Olson, Council on Foreign Relations luminary and former Secretary of Labor, and Carl Bildt, top Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister. Carlucci was chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1989-2005 and oversaw gargantuan profits the defense contractor made in the aftermath of 9/11 following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Carlyle Group has also received investment money from the Bin Laden family. Reportedly, the RAND proposal brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq. Economic collapse causes extinction Tom Bearden 2K History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response. Or suppose a desperate China-whose long-range nuclear missiles (some) can reach the United States-attacks Taiwan. In addition to immediate responses, the mutual treaties involved in such scenarios will quickly draw other nations into the conflict, escalating it significantly. Strategic nuclear studies have shown for decades that, under such extreme stress conditions, once a few nukes are launched, adversaries and potential adversaries are then compelled to launch on perception of preparations by one's adversary. The real legacy of the MAD concept is this side of the MAD coin that is almost never discussed. Without effective defense, the only chance a nation has to survive at all is to launch immediate full-bore pre-emptive strikes and try to take out its perceived foes as rapidly and massively as possible. As the studies showed, rapid escalation to full WMD exchange occurs. Today, a great percent of the WMD arsenals that will be unleashed, are already on site within the United States itself. The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades. Prolif New proliferators not more likely to use weapons/warfight—nukes decrease frequency and intensity of wars—4 reasons. Kenneth N. Waltz, Adjunct Professor, Columbia University, Professor Emeritus, UC-Berkeley, THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: A DEBATE RENEWED, with Scott D. Sagan, 2003, p.36-37. Does the spread of nuclear weapons threaten to make wars more intense at regional levels, where wars of high intensity have been possible for many years? If weaker countries are unable to defend at lesser levels of violence, might they destroy themselves through resorting to nuclear weapons? Lesser nuclear states live in fear of this possibility. But this is not different from the fear under which the United States and the Soviet Union lived for years. Small nuclear states may experience a keen sense of desperation because of vulnerability to conventional as well as to nuclear attack, but, again, in desperate situations what all parties become most desperate to avoid is the use of strategic nuclear weapons. Still, however improbable the event, lesser states may one day fire some of their weapons. Are minor nuclear states more or less likely to do so than major ones? The answer to this question is vitally important because the existence of some states would be at stake even if the damage done were regionally confined. | 9/28/13 |
SPC BF Neg--Round 3 ValleyTournament: Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Iowa City WW | Judge: Dustin Myers-Levy
Architects of engagement strategies can choose from a wide variety of incentives. Economic engagement might offer tangible incentives such as export credits, investment insurance or promotion, access to technology, loans and economic aid.3 Other equally useful economic incentives involve the removal of penalties such as trade embargoes, investment bans or high tariffs, which have impeded economic relations between the United States and the target country. Facilitated entry into the economic global arena and the institutions that govern it rank among the most potent incentives in today’s global market. Similarly, political engagement can involve the lure of diplomatic recognition, access to regional or international institutions, the scheduling of summits between leaders – or the termination of these benefits. Military engagement could involve the extension of international military educational training in order both to strengthen respect for civilian authority and human rights among a country’s armed forces and, more feasibly, to establish relationships between Americans and young foreign military officers. While these areas of engagement are likely to involve working with state institutions, cultural or civil-society engagement entails building people-to-people contacts. Funding nongovernmental organisations, facilitating the flow of remittances and promoting the exchange of students, tourists and other non-governmental people between countries are just some of the possible incentives used in the form of engagement. 2. The aff is bilateral security cooperation—that’s not topical 3. Limits are key to meaningful debate Zizek-Cap K Strategies of Economic Engagement With Latin America are An Attempt to Empower a Fantasy of Control and Exceptionalism—The Affirmative Attempt to Engage is No Different From an Attempt to Exploit and Otherize Similar histories of United States interventionism abound. In Los Angeles alone, tens of thousands of immigrants who live and work among us from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, for example, are refugees from horrendous military and paramilitary repression during the 1980s and 1990s that was supported and funded by the United States. This country’s foreign policy goals included the prevention of any alternative model to free market capitalism from arising in the hemisphere to challenge the hegemonic political, economic and military role of the United States. Thus efforts such as those by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to create welfare state capitalist governments modelled after the Scandinavian countries were labelled ‘communist’ and targeted for elimination. Today, the Bush administration’s covert actions in various countries in Latin America, including Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, have the aim of maintaining United States access to key natural resources and political influence in the region. Although they are overshadowed for people in this country by the administration’s policies in the Middle East, they do not go unnoticed by Latin Americans. Indeed, the present interventionist strategies of the United States in Latin America have reinforced profound anxieties among many Latin Americans about this country’s policies throughout the world. The United States has consistently opted for strategies that have attacked the sovereignty of nations and caused increasing misery for the majority. It has consistently repressed movements for social change, a pattern that predates the era of state terrorism. The United States Doctrine of National Security was developed at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s and provided the ideological basis of United States policy, which included military aid and training to Latin American militaries. It called for the use of violent repression throughout Latin America in the struggle against ‘subversion’, which it defined in an all-inclusive manner: ‘those actions, violent or not, with ultimate purposes of a political nature, in all fields of human activity within the internal sphere of a state and whose aims are perceived as not convenient for the overall political system.’ But the assumptions underlying the national security doctrine can be found in the history of United States policy toward Latin America dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a rapidly industrializing United States sought expanding markets and raw materials in the region justified by an ideology known as Manifest Destiny. The Euro-Americans, who composed the corporate and governmental elites, viewed Latin Americans in racist stereotypes, reflecting the same process of dehumanization that had legitimized their exploitative attitudes and treatment of nonEuropean racial groups in this country. Characterized by a kind of narcissistic grandiosity born of their successful position at the helm of one of the world’s most powerful and aggressive capitalist economies, they energetically devised a foreign policy to extend their political and economic influence throughout Latin America. Manifest Destiny depicted Latin Americans as dark-skinned, mixed-blood peoples, naturally unruly childlike creatures who needed the United States to intervene in their internal affairs to ‘help’ them put their houses in order: ‘God has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead to the regeneration of the world . . . We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace’ (Burns and Charlip, 2002). The Attempt to Understand Terrorism Only as Military Strikes Against the United States is Ignorant and Ignores the Everyday Terroristic Violence that Plagues Latin America—We Must Understand this Prior Relationship to Solve I begin my analysis with a summary statement of my understanding of the relationship between psychic and social reality, a theoretical perspective that underlies what I have to say. For many scholars of social theory and psychoanalysis it is futile to speak of psychic and external reality as if they were two separate registers. From the beginning of life, they argue, subjectivity is fashioned out of the intimate interplay between the imaginary dimensions of the unconscious, characterized by representations, drives and affects, and the sociosymbolic order, composed of asymmetrical relations of power and force. Freud emphasized that our earliest experiences are rooted in dependence on parental authority and that the formation of the superego constitutes such a powerful identification with authority because it is saturated with the vicissitudes of sexuality and aggression. In other words, subjectivity is constituted from the beginning of psychic life in an identification with and a resistance to authority so deep seated that it is destined to be repeated throughout life, not only within the family, but in one’s relationship to the larger social group – the sociosymbolic order (Elliot, 1999). This perspective provides the context for my exploration of individual and group experience with respect to the psychological meanings of the current political culture in this country. When I say ‘current political culture’ I am referring to the period since September 11 2001, which I think we can all agree represents a watershed in many ways, not the least of which was the rupture of the sense of exceptionalism experienced by people in this country. Americans had presumed that the politically motivated violence ubiquitous in the world happens to other people, to other citizens in other countries, not to us, not to Americans. In fact, this conviction was shared by those people in other countries who have been victims of political terror; what they lost was a sense of hope related to the belief that at least one place on earth was free of the terrorist violence from which they suffer. Such was the case for many Latin Americans, who have been the victims of a long history of politically motivated terror. Indeed, the very date of September 11 was retraumatizing to many Latin Americans and provoked a profound identification with the innocent victims killed in the Twin Towers and with the American people in general. I say retraumatizing because for the past three decades throughout Latin America, September 11 had already come to symbolize terrorism, only in this case, a different kind of terror, one that was planned, implemented and perpetrated by the state rather than a fundamentalist political organization. Like many of our southern neighbors, as I watched horrified as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, my immediate associations were with that other September 11, when Chilean democracy was overturned by a bloody military coup in 1973. Ever since then, September 11 has become a symbol of the era of state terror from the 1970s through the 1990s, when many countries in Latin America were taken over and ruled by ruthless military dictatorships that kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Any Security Structure Relies on an Implicit Threat of Violence—The Discourse of the War On Terror Epitomizes the Fact that Challenges to Proliferation and Terrorism Today Justify a Violence By Which American Power Becomes the Evil it Seeks to Challenge Every power structure has to rely on an underlying implicit threat, i.e. whatever the oficial democratic rules and legal constraints may be, we can ultimately do whatever we want to you. In the 20th century, however, the nature of this link between power and the invisible threat that sustains it changed. Existing power structures no longer relied on their own fantasmatic projection of a potential, invisible threat in order to secure the hold over their subjects. Rather, the threat was externalized, displaced onto an Outside Enemy. It became the invisible (and, for that reason, all-powerful and omni-present) threat of this enemy that legitimized the existing power structure's permanent state of emergency. Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy, Americans the threat of Communism-all the way up to today's "war on terror." The threats posed by such an invisible enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike. Precisely because the threat is virtual, one cannot afford to wait for it to come. Rather, one must strike in advance, before it is too late. In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense-which, of course, are what pose the true threat to democracy and human rights (e.g., the London police's recent execution of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes). Classic power functioned as a threat that operated precisely by never actualizing itself, by always remaining a threatening gesture. Such functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, when the threat of mutual nuclear destruction had to remain a threat. With the "war on terror", the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization, not of the threat itself, but, of the measures against the threat. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of preemptive strikes against potential terrorists. We are thus passing from the logic of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to a logic in which ONE SOLE MADMAN runs the entire show and is allowed to enact its paranoia. The power that presents itself as always being under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power-the very model of the Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy. And indeed, it was Nietzsche himself who, more than a century ago, in Daybreak, provided the best analysis of the false moral premises of today's "war on terror": No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. Is not the ongoing "war on terror" proof that "terror" is the antagonistic Other of democracy-the point at which democracy's plural options turn into a singular antagonism? Or, as we so often hear, "In the face of the terrorist threat, we must all come together and forget our petty differences." More pointedly, the difference between the "war on terror" with previous 20th century worldwide struggles such as the Cold War is that the enemy used to be clearly identified with the actually existing Communist empire, whereas today the terrorist threat is inherently spectral, without a visible center. It is a little bit like the description of Linda Fiorentino's character in The Last Seduction: "Most people have a dark side ... she had nothing else." Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side ... the terrorist threat has nothing else. The paradoxical result of this spectralization of the enemy is an unexpected reflexive reversal. In this world without a clearly identified enemy, it is the United States, the protector against the threat, that is emerging as the main enemy-much like in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient-Express, where, since the entire group of suspects is the murderer, the victim himself (an evil millionaire) turns out to be the real criminal. Terror is Caused Not by Rationality, a Fundamentally Racist Belief, but Rather Terrorists Adopting Our Own Metric for Judging Them. The Usage of Politically Correct Assumptions like Irrationality is Simply Their Culture Serves to Mask the Fact that we are Exactly like the Other. As to the "terrorist" fundamentalists' attacks, the first thing that strikes the eye 1 is the inadequacy of the idea, developed most systematically by Donald Davidson, that human acts are rationally-intentional, accountable in the terms of beliefs and desires of the agent. 2 This approach exemplifies the racist bias of the theories of "rationality": although their aim is to understand the Other from within, they end up attributing to the Other the most ridiculous beliefs (up to the infamous 400 virgins awaiting the believer in Paradise as the "rational" explanation of why he is ready to blow himself up), i.e., they makes the other ridiculously weird in the very effort of trying to make him "like us." Here is a passage from one of the propaganda texts distributed by North Korea during the Korean war: "Hero Kang Ho-yung was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the Kamak Hill Battle, so he rolled into the midst of the enemy with a hand grenade in his mouth and wiped them out, shouting: 'My arms and legs were broken. But on the contrary my retaliatory spirit against you scoundrels became a thousand times stronger. I will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the Workers' Party of Korea and unflinching will firmly pledged to the Party and the Leader!'" 3 It is easy to laugh at the ridiculously non-realistic character of this description: how could the poor Kang talk if he was holding the grenade with his mouth? And how is it that, in the midst of a fierce battle, there was time for such a long declamatory proclamation? However, what if the mistake is to read this passage as a realistic description, thus imputing to Koreans ridiculous beliefs? In other words, what if the mistake is the same one as that of the anthropologists who impute to "primitive" aborigines celebrating the eagle as their ancestor the belief that they are really descended from the eagle? Why not read this passage - which effectively sounds operatic in its pathos - in the way similar to listening to Act III of Wagner's Tristan, where the mortally wounded Tristan is singing his (extremely demanding) dying chant for almost an hour - who of us is ready to impute to Wagner the belief that this is possible? The fundamentalist Islamic terror is NOT grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of the global consumerist civilization: the problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that THEY THEMSELVES secretly consider themselves inferior (like, obviously, Hitler himself felt towards Jews) - which is why our condescending Politically Correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that they secretly already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for Dalai Lama who justifies the Tibetan Buddhism in WESTERN terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dosage of "true" "racist" conviction into one's own superiority. Their Focus on Violent Catastrophe and The Demand for Survival is the Basis For the Destruction They Seek to Avoid—We Must Intervene Into the Ideology of War to Solve Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer’s concept of “pure war” refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely (12).2We as psychoanalysts can—and increasingly must—explore the impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient’s worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet.3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our cultural veneer? At the end of the First World War, the first “total war,” Walter Benjamin observed that “nothing after the war remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body”(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary situation, “The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror...can rage absolutely” (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that “war is too serious to be confined to the military” (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15). Virilio and Lotringer gave the name “pure war” to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destruction—it requires a way out—but this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibility— at least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposes— pure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death. The Global Circulation of Commodities Brings With it the Seclusion of Populations—The Logic of the Wall is Identical With the Logic of Trade, Enabling the Projection of Racism and Hatred Onto Those on the Other Side But we are not dealing here only with good old racism. Something more is at stake, a fundamental feature of the emerging "global" society. On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the "happy '90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history": the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy '90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The rise of the populist New Right is just the most prominent example of the urge to raise new walls. A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the European Union passed almost unnoticed: a plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of the Union territory, so as to prevent the influx of the immigrants. This is the truth of globalization: the construction of new walls safeguarding the prosperous Europe from a flood of immigrants. One is tempted to resuscitate here the old Marxist "humanist" opposition of "relations between things" and "relations between persons": In the much celebrated free circulation opened up by the global capitalism, it is "things" (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of "persons" is more and more controlled./ We are thus not dealing with "globalization as an unfinished project," but with a true "dialectics of globalization." The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the "natural" superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it 's an unabashed economic egotism-the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it. In the beginning of October 2005, the Spanish police, who have dealt with the problem of desperate African migrants trying to penetrate the small Spanish territory across Gibraltar with lethal force, displayed their plans to build a wall between the Spanish and Moroccan border. The images presented-a complex structure with all the latest electronic equipment-bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the Berlin Wall, only with the opposite motive, designed to prevent people from coming in, not getting out. The cruel irony is that it is the government of Zapatero, arguably the most anti-racist and tolerant in Europe, that is forced to adopt these measures of segregation-a clear sign of the limits of the multiculturalist "tolerant" approach which preaches open borders and acceptance of Others. It is thus becoming clear that the solution is not "tear down the walls and let them all in," the easy, empty demand often put forth by soft-hearted liberal "radicals." Rather, the real solution is to tear down the true wall, not the police one, but the social-economic one: To change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world. This brings us back to rumours and "reports" about "subjects supposed to loot and rape:" New Orleans is one of those cities within the United States most heavily marked by the internal wall that separates the affluent from ghettoized blacks. And it is about those on the other side of the wall that we fantasize: More and more, they live in another world, in a blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires. The "subject supposed to loot and rape" is on the other side of the Wall-this is the subject about whom Bennett can afford to make his slips of the tongue and confess in a censored mode his murderous dreams. More than anything else, the rumors and fake reports from the aftermath of Katrina bear witness to the deep class division of American society. Thinking the Questions of War and Violence Only in Their Relation to an Exceptional American Identity Ignores and Scapegoats the Rest of the World—This is the Basis of the Fantasy Structure that Causes the Violence You Outline in the First Place—Even if You Win the Reality of Your Impacts, The Alternative is a Precondition for Solving the Structures of Violence in the First Pace To understand how this shift in perspective occurred, we need to interpret the nature of the political culture and the group psychology that has characterized this country in the past several years. In the initial period after 9/11, American citizens were caught off guard, shocked and confused. Why us? Why here? How did we become the innocent victims of such a monstrous attack? How could anyone want to do something so bad to us? As an ostensibly puzzled President Bush put it, ‘But why do they hate us? We are so good.’ Of course, this was a cynical question; Bush really wasn’t interested in an answer. And as it turned out, at least until recently, neither were the majority of United States citizens, most of whom were whipped into a patriotic retaliatory frenzy that admitted no selfreflection, no critical inquiry. However, many Latin Americans would have been happy to offer Bush an explanation. For even while the terrorist attacks constituted a crime against humanity, the imagery of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – symbols of free market globalization and United States military might – represented a macabre yet dazzling statement – or enactment, in psychoanalytic terms – of the causes of international antipathy to the United States, if only its leaders and citizens were willing to interpret the message. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. Why not? From my perspective, the Bush administration developed a course of action that, while being depicted as a justifiable defense against aggression, represented an escalation of a tradition of United States global expansion and aggressive diplomatic, military and corporate policies toward countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America (Johnson, 2004). I think it was a foregone conclusion that this administration’s response to the horrendous terrorist attacks would escalate unilateral United States military and economic policies abroad. Government priorities foreclosed the possibility that in the traumatic aftermath of the unprecedented attack on this country the public would be presented with a leader(ship) capable of modelling restraint and the capacity to tolerate the anxiety, fear and rage stimulated by a crisis situation. Our leaders were not prepared to provide a reflective and analytic stance, although ideally September 11 could have provided the stimulus for the creation of what Winnicott would call a new potential space or Bion would see as container for the purposes of considering important questions. Critical reflection about the 9/11 crisis might have expanded US options to include diminishing the cycles of violence in the world. Such a reality-based complex stance would represent the political equivalent of moving, in psychoanalytic terms, from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, from primitive splitting and projection to the development of integrative and reparative capacities. This process could not occur because the neoconservative agenda that was already in place before 9/11 took advantage of a traumatized citizenry to implement a broad range of social, political and economic objectives it had been working on for years. Through policies based on secrecy and deception, the Bush administration has expanded the executive branch of government at the expense of our constitutional system of checks and balances. It has promoted economic policies that redistribute wealth upward from the majority of American citizens to a small ruling elite, all the while securing consensual support for its policies through a broad-based strategy of perpetuating fear and insecurity that predisposes most people to relinquish critical thinking about the general impact of their government’s priorities. Moreover, Bush’s bellicose actions in Afghanistan and Iraq fulfilled traumatized citizens’ fantasies of being rescued by a strong leader through whom they could realize wishes for revenge. Identification with the aggressor (leadership) served to minimize an otherwise overwhelming sense of vulnerability. The government’s simplistic discourse, which bifurcated the world into good and bad, civilization versus barbarism, the Christian world versus Evil, provided citizens with the means by which they could identify with an all-powerful goodness while projecting all that was bad onto a demonized other. Rationality thereby being diminished, many people were swept away by the Bush administration’s daily overdose of the patriotic ideological mass media blitz that diminished their capacity to recognize the ways in which their safety and welfare were being assaulted from powerful domestic as well as foreign sources. In the post-9/11 climate, the United States government’s aggressive posture escalated to include the unilateral right to declare preemptive war and to threaten nations that have attempted to acquire nuclear capacity; all the while it was initiating plans to develop a new generation of ‘baby’ nuclear bombs and to militarize outer space The Fantasies Created By the Affirmative Structure are Ultimately False, The Response To Such Failures is the Inevitable Violence Which Attempts to Bridge the Gap Between the Everyday World and the Belief Which Undermines The Affirmative As Badiou demonstrated apropos of the Stalinist show trials, this violent effort to distill the pure Real from the elusive reality necessarily ends up in its opposite, in the obsession with pure appearance: in the Stalinist universe, the passion of the Real (ruthless enforcement of the Socialist development) thus culminates in ritualistic stagings of a theatrical spectacle in the truth of which no one believes. The key to this reversal resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious, since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle. The fundamental illusion is here that, once the violent work of purification is done, the New Man will emerge ex nihilo, freed from the filth of the past corruption. Within this horizon, "really-existing men" are reduced to the stock of raw material which can be ruthlessly exploited for the construction of the new - the Stalinist revolutionary definition of man is a circular one: "man is what is to be crushed, stamped on, mercilessly worked over, in order to produce a new man." We have here the tension between the series of "ordinary" elements ("ordinary" men as the "material" of history) and the exceptional "empty" element (the socialist "New Man," which is at first nothing but an empty place to be filled up with positive content through the revolutionary turmoil). In a revolution, there is no a priori positive determination of this New Man: a revolution is not legitimized by the positive notion of what Man's essence, "alienated" in present conditions and to be realized through the revolutionary process, is - the only legitimization of a revolution is negative, a will to break with the Past. One should formulate here things in a very precise way: the reason why the Stalinist fury of purification is so destructive resides in the very fact that it is sustained by the belief that, after the destructive work of purification will be accomplished, SOMETHING WILL REMAIN, the sublime "indivisible remainder," the paragon of the New. It is in order to conceal the fact that there is nothing beyond that, i/n a strictly perverse way, the revolutionary has to cling to violence as the only index of his authenticity, and it is as this level that the critics of Stalinism as a rule misperceive the cause of the Communist's attachment to the Party. Say, when, in 1939-1941 pro-Soviet Communists twice had to change their Party line overnight (after the Soviet-German pact, it was imperialism, not, Fascism, which was elevated to the role of the main enemy; from June 22 1941, when Germany attacked Soviet Union, it was again the popular front against the Fascist beast), the brutality of the imposed changes of position was what attracted them. Along the same lines, the purges themselves exerted an uncanny fascination, especially on intellectuals: their "irrational" cruelty served as a kind of ontological proof, bearing witness to the fact that we are dealing with the Real, not just with empty plans - the Party is ruthlessly brutal, so it means business... Our Alternative is To Reject the Idea Implicit in the Affirmative that One Must Identify Within the Boundaries of the System. By Choosing the Third Way Politics Refuses to Acknowledge, We Realign Our Symbolic Fantasies with the Ethics of the Real, Rupturing the Fantasy We Have Chosen to Call Reality and Creating New Possibilities. Zizek is concerned to confront this alibi head on and to oppose it with an ethics of the Real (see also Zupancic, 2000). This is an ethics in which we assume responsibility for our own actions and our inscription within the broader life-world up to and including the construction of socio-economic reality. This is not to embrace any kind of carte blanche approach to reality. The point is rather that we should address the full implications of the way in which our reality is reproduced in human terms and not as a cosmic order. We cannot hide behind terms like "globalisation", "pragmatism", "economic reality", "rationality" and so on, as if they described a neutral ontological order. On the contrary, we are obliged to confront the way in which such terms attempt to ideologically disguise the artificial nature of reality (this grimace of the Real) and, on that very basis, to make real (Real) ethical decisions: i.e. decisions that begin from the position that genuine transformation is always possible and always involves this traumatic dimension of the Real; this dimension of rupture with existing symbolic structures. An ethics of the Real is not one of accepting impossibility in the sense of an indefinite ideal, but is rather one that entreats us to risk the impossible: to break out of the bonds of existing possibility. This opens the way to what Zizek refers to as the act and to overcome the symbolic mortification associated with the ideological-cynical attitude that revolves around, a fetishized notion of absolute reality. The Third Wayist perspective, for example, is largely stupefied by its master signifier "globalisation" and is consequently unable to mount any real challenge to the basic power structures. Global (capitalist) reality is in place, so it is chiefly a question of adjustment and of adopting a mature-pragmatic attitude. Politics is reduced to a repetitive logic of deliberation rather than active resistance; a politics of conformism towards a determinate order of reality rather than a reconfiguration of that reality. Like Hamlet, Third Wayism remains transfixed by the spectre of impossibility (the global Thing) and this renders it incapable of risking the impossible; of passing to the act. Zizek's thought is concerned crucially to reactivate the dimension of the miraculous in political endeavour. For Zizek the miracle is that which coincides with trauma in the sense that it involves a fundamental moment of symbolic disintegration (2001b: 86). This is the mark of the act: a basic rupture in the weave of reality that opens up new possibilities and creates the space for a reconfiguration of reality itself. Like the miracle, the act is ultimately unsustainable - it cannot be reduced to, or incorporated directly within, the symbolic order. Yet it is through the act that we touch (and are touched by) the Real in such a way that the bonds of our symbolic universe are broken and that an alternative construction is enabled; reality is transformed in a Real sense. Methodology comes first – our job as intellectuals is not to answer the questions made by the system, but to challenge and reformulate the questions being asked Slavoj Žižek: What is crucial and also I think—especially today, when we have some kind of re-emergence of at least some kind of practical spirit, protest, and so on—one of the dangers I see amongst some radical academia circles is this mistrust in theory, you know, saying, “Who needs fat books on Hegel and logic? My god, they have to act!” No, I think quite on the contrary. More than ever, today it’s crucial to emphasize that on the one hand, yes, every empirical example undermines theory. There are no full examples. But, point two, this does not mean that we should turn the examples against theory. At the same time, there is no exception. There are no examples outside theories. Every example of a theory is an indication of the inner split dynamics of the theory itself, and here dialectics begins, and so on.... Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.” Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.” But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?” FM: You spoke at Occupy Wall Street a few months ago. What is your personal involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and what do you think the protests signify? SZ: None. My personal involvement was some guy who was connected with it, and he told me, “Would you go there, come there?” And I said, “Okay. Why not?” Then the same guy told me,“Be careful, because microphones are prohibited, you know, it’s this echoing, repeating.” So my friend told me, frankly, to be demagogic: “Just try to be as much as possible effective, short, slow,” and so on, and that was it. I didn’t even drop my work. What does Occupy mean? Then they tell you, “Oh, Wall Street should work for the Main Street, not the opposite,” but the problem is not this. The problem is that the system stated that there is no Main Street without Wall Street. That is to say that banking and credits are absolutely crucial for the system to function today. That is why I understand Obama when—two years ago you know when the first, I think it was, $750 billion and a bit more—it was simply blackmail and it was not possible to say no because that’s how the system functions. If Wall Street were to break down, everything would break. We should think more radically. So again, the formula “Give money to Main Street and not to Wall Street” is ruined. That is to say, all these honest, hardworking people who do their jobs cannot find work now. Think how to change that. Think how to change the mechanisms of that. We are no longer dealing with short-term crises like in 2008. FM: Why do you believe that the Right and the Left in America have failed to provide answers to the problems of inequality and the crises they predict? SZ: It’s crazy but I’m convinced about it: look at the last two seasons of “24.” Look closely, something very interesting happens. It’s not only superficial, political correctness. In season seven, Jack Bauer investigates some Muslim attacks and then he discovers it’s not Muslims at all: it’s some American mega-security company who is manipulating these attacks. Something much more tragic happened in the last season, which I quite liked. It’s that, at the end, Jack Bauer breaks out of this authoritarian logic. Somebody has to do the dirty job, torturing, and so on. He says, “Maybe I should say it publicly, everything, I cannot live with it.” So this logic of “The true heroes are those who are ready to do the dirty job—torture for the country,” it breaks down. His liberal counterpoint, the president, Allison Taylor, also breaks down and has to quit. So that, at the end, you get a very honest assessment of a deadlock and the message is: within the present global systemic coordinates, whatever you do, you end up in a deadlock. I think this honest confrontation with the ethical deadlock is much more valuable than the Hollywood Left “feel-good” attitude of movies like Pelican Brief or All the President’s Men, which may appear radical in their accusation: “Oh my god, even the President of the United States can be corrupted blah blah blah.” Nonetheless, these are all “feel-good” movies because at the end the final message is: “Wow, what a great country! Two ordinary guys can overthrow the mightiest man in the world!” If I were to choose between this Leftist, liberal All the President’s Men or Jack Bauer, I would choose Jack Bauer every day. I’m sorry to tell you. Because it does what honest conservatives want—not reactionaries: reactionaries are stupid, they think if we go back to lost values, it will work. Liberals are stupid progressives. What we can learn from honest conservatives is that they are ready to accept a deadlock. For example, Marx said about Balzac: precisely as a conservative, Balzac depicted the deadlock of French society. Even American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, he no longer believes in this bullshit “end of history.” He told me that the very fact of the possibility of biogenetic manipulations makes his thesis on the “end of history” obsolete. And he thinks that to cope with this problem we need much stronger forms of social control, which liberal-democratic capitalism cannot provide. This is what I like and this is what we can learn from honest conservatives: they don’t bullshit you. And maybe this is the duty of us intellectuals. You know when people ask me on Wall Street, “What should we do?” I was so embarrassed because, fuck you, what do I know? I don’t. But what we should do is simply break the rules in the sense of opening new space. The world is confused as it is, always, from Wall Street to Egypt. Nonetheless, it is opening up space. People are becoming aware. It’s the first move, but nonetheless, we have to start to think about some kind of radical change. All these Leftist, liberal things—more gay rights, more abortion—of course we fight for that, but that’s not enough. Ironically, when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face; these guys are offering us global capitalism with a human face. It’s the same system but a little bit more.... We have to break this taboo, which was very strong until now: nobody even dared to imagine an alternative. Everyone was, in a way as I say, a Fukuyamist. Even radicals, we somehow accept that global capitalism and liberal democracy are here to stay, and the point is only to make the system a little bit more efficient. No, it is clear we have to start thinking. And this is a great responsibility, because of course there is no way back to the glories of 20th century communism. No, but that’s our duty at this point, just to open up the field and, at the same time, to undermine, break. We have to be very destructive at this point, destructive in the sense of breaking false illusions.... Who would have expected the Arab Spring, or whatever you call it? It did happen. Who would have expected these big demonstrations in Europe that are occurring? They are happening. People at the beginning thought, “Oh this is something that will explode.” No, it goes on. There is a tremendous potential in dissatisfaction. But again, this is always a potential danger. FM: It seems that a similar deadlock appears in the context of both the economic crisis and global warming—experts can’t seem to predict them, nor will politicians or society act to stop them. SZ: I especially hate, from my own experience, when people say, “Oh, who could have predicted this economic crisis?” No. I know a couple of leftists and empiricists who exactly predicted this. These are not the kinds of cheap catastrophists who all of the time give bad predictions and then something happens so that they go awry. No, no. They were very precise and predicted this crisis. Paul Krugman said something deeply true. A guy asked him, “But now that we know, wouldn’t things be radically different if we were to know 10 years back what we know now?” He said, “No, no, it wouldn’t. The system pushes you to act in a certain way.” The illusion is much stronger. Like, you may know that there may be a catastrophe, but nonetheless, we would have done exactly the same thing. I mean, it’s no longer a question of knowledge. Today many, even sociologists, have this wonderful idea of how, although we live in a society of knowledge—even scientific knowledge—it is becoming more and more contingent, non-binding. I think it was the German theorist Ulrich Beck who drew attention to the simple fact: today we speak about expert opinions. Are we aware how paradoxical this term is? The idea is that we ordinary people have opinions. They tell you the truth. Now experts all of a sudden are telling us different opinions and we have to decide how, who knows, if even they don’t know. This is the tragedy of our predicament of freedom of choice. The problem is...we are often forced to choose without having serious cognitive coordinates of how or what to choose.... The price is that science is no longer a homogenous science but it’s turning into kind of a pluralistic field of opinions. For example, I once had a debate with a quantum physicist. And he accused me, “You stupid guys with your French theory, total bullshit.” He made fun precisely of this: “You can just say whatever you want.” And I told him, “Fuck you! Look at quantum physics: literally anything goes. You can claim that there is a Big Bang, that there is no Big Bang, there were multiple Big Bangs…” It’s incredible how, when science approaches a certain limit, how open it becomes. It’s as if anything you can imagine, you find scientists who advocate. I’m not saying science is just laughable. It is real. I’m just saying how difficult it is to decide today without a proper cognitive base. We are more and more compelled to this. Andre Depui said that the problem when people say, “Oh but we don’t know if it’s really global warming.” The problem is that if you want to wait until we really know, it will be, by definition, too late. Because we will really know when the catastrophe is here. This is maybe one of the great things that has to be decided as a specific problem—in Germany there were working with certain proponents of risk society—how to decide some basic rules of decision-making in situations that are cognitively non-transparent. You have to decide because not doing anything is also a decision. You have to decide, but you don’t know. The situation is not transparent. DA Obama is focused on financial issues – political capital will be key and is working now There’s a simple reason President Barack Obama is using his bully pulpit to focus the nation’s attention on the battle over the budget: In this fight, he’s watching Republicans take swings at each other. And that GOP fight is a lifeline for an administration that had been scrambling to gain control its message after battling congressional Democrats on the potential use of military force in Syria and the possible nomination of Larry Summers to run the Federal Reserve. If House Republicans and Obama can’t cut even a short-term deal for a continuing resolution, the government’s authority to spend money will run out on Oct. 1. Within weeks, the nation will default on its debt if an agreement isn’t reached to raise the federal debt limit. For some Republicans, those deadlines represent a leverage point that can be used to force Obama to slash his health care law. For others, they’re a zero hour at which the party will implode if it doesn’t cut a deal. Meanwhile, “on the looming fiscal issues, Democrats — both liberal and conservative, executive and congressional — are virtually 100 percent united,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). Just a few days ago, all that Obama and his aides could talk about were Syria and Summers. Now, they’re bringing their party together and shining a white hot light on Republican disunity over whether to shut down the government and plunge the nation into default in a vain effort to stop Obamacare from going into effect. The squabbling among Republicans has gotten so vicious that a Twitter hashtag — #GOPvsGOPugliness — has become a thick virtual data file for tracking the intraparty insults. Moderates, and even some conservatives, are slamming Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite, for ramping up grassroots expectations that the GOP will shut down the government if it can’t win concessions from the president to “defund” his signature health care law. “I didn’t go to Harvard or Princeton, but I can count,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) tweeted, subtly mocking Cruz’s Ivy League education. “The defunding box canyon is a tactic that will fail and weaken our position.” While it is well-timed for the White House to interrupt a bad slide, Obama’s singular focus on the budget battle is hardly a last-minute shift. Instead, it is a return to the narrative arc that the White House was working to build before the Syria crisis intervened. And it’s so important to the president’s strategy that White House officials didn’t consider postponing Monday’s rollout of the most partisan and high-stakes phase even when a shooter murdered a dozen people at Washington’s Navy Yard that morning. The basic storyline, well under way over the summer, was to have the president point to parts of his agenda, including reducing the costs of college and housing, designed to strengthen the middle class; use them to make the case that he not only saved the country from economic disaster but is fighting to bolster the nation’s finances on both the macro and household level; and then argue that Republicans’ desire to lock in the sequester and leverage a debt-ceiling increase for Obamacare cuts would reverse progress made. The president is on firm ground, White House officials say, because he stands with the public in believing that the government shouldn’t shut down and that the country should pay its bills. Drains capital – Backlash and hostage taking on unrelated priority legislation is empirically proven, likely in future and specifically true for Rubio – Cuba policy is totally unique – this is the best link card you will ever read The Second Obama Administration Where in the executive branch will control over Cuba policy lie? Political considerations played a major role in Obama's Cuba policy during the first term, albeit not as preeminent a consideration as they were during the Clinton years. In 2009, Obama's new foreign policy team got off to a bad start when they promised Senator Menendez that they would consult him before changing Cuba policy. That was the price he extracted for providing Senate Democrats with the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster on a must-pass omnibus appropriations bill to keep the government operating. For the next four years, administration officials worked more closely with Menendez, who opposed the sort of major redirection of policy Obama had promised, than they did with senators like John Kerry (D-Mass.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, whose views were more in line with the president's stated policy goals. At the Department of State, Assistant Secretary Arturo Valenzuela favored initiatives to improve relations with Cuba, but he was stymied by indifference or resistance elsewhere in the bureaucracy. Secretary Hillary Clinton, having staked out a tough position Cuba during the Democratic primary campaign, was not inclined to be the driver for a new policy. At the NSC, Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere Dan Restrepo, who advised Obama on Latin America policy during the 2008 campaign, did his best to avoid the Cuba issue because it was so fraught with political danger. When the president finally approved the resumption of people-to-people travel to Cuba, which Valenzuela had been pushing, the White House political team delayed the announcement for several months at the behest of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Any easing of the travel regulations, she warned, would hurt Democrats' prospects in the upcoming mid-term elections.43 The White House shelved the new regulations until January 2011, and then announced them late Friday before a holiday weekend. Then, just a year later, the administration surrendered to Senator Rubio's demand that it limit the licensing of travel providers in exchange for him dropping his hold on the appointment of Valenzuela's replacement.44 With Obama in his final term and Vice-President Joe Biden unlikely to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 (unlike the situation Clinton and Gore faced in their second term), politics will presumably play a less central role in deciding Cuba policy over the next four years. There will still be the temptation, however, to sacrifice Cuba policy to mollify congressional conservatives, both Democrat and Republican, who are willing to hold other Obama initiatives hostage to extract concessions on Cuba. And since Obama has given in to such hostage-taking previously, the hostage-takers have a strong incentive to try the same tactic again. The only way to break this cycle would be for the president to stand up to them and refuse to give in, as he did when they attempted to rollback his 2009 relaxation of restrictions on CubanAmerican travel and remittances. Much will depend on who makes up Obama's new foreign policy team, especially at the Department of State. John Kerry has been a strong advocate of a more open policy toward Cuba, and worked behind the scenes with the State Department and USAID to clean up the "democracy promotion" program targeting Cuba, as a way to win the release of Alan Gross. A new secretary is likely to bring new assistant secretaries, providing an opportunity to revitalize the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, which has been thoroughly cowed by congressional hardliners. But even with new players in place, does Cuba rise to the level of importance that would justify a major new initiative and the bruising battle with conservatives on the Hill? Major policy changes that require a significant expenditure of political capital rarely happen unless the urgency of the problem forces policymakers to take action. Obama is key to avoid shutdown that kills the economy and hegemony Then there is the overload of business on the congressional agenda when the two houses return on Sept. 9 -with only nine legislative days scheduled for action in the month. We have serious confrontations ahead on spending bills and the debt limit, as the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and the debt ceiling approaches just a week or two thereafter. Before the news that we would drop everything for an intense debate on whether to strike militarily in Syria, Congress-watchers were wondering how we could possibly deal with the intense bargaining required to avoid one or more government shutdowns and/or a real breach of the debt ceiling, with devastating consequences for American credibility and the international economy. Beyond the deep policy and political divisions, Republican congressional leaders will likely use both a shutdown and the debt ceiling as hostages to force the president to cave on their demands for deeper spending cuts. Avoiding this end-game bargaining will require the unwavering attention of the same top leaders in the executive and legislative branches who will be deeply enmeshed in the Syria debate. The possibility -even probability -of disruptions caused by partial shutdowns could complicate any military actions. The possibility is also great that the rancor that will accompany the showdowns over fiscal policy will bleed over into the debate about America and Syria. CP Counterplan: The executive branch of the United States federal government should normalize relations with Cuba. XOs cut through partisanship to promote progressive goals, often catalyze congress and result in legislation In this type of a situation, when entrenched interests and shortsightedness have bogged down policymaking, Presidential action can promote progressive change and justice. Thomas Jefferson issued an Executive Order in 1803 to complete the Louisiana Purchase; President Lincoln issued an Executive Order in 1863 to free the slaves (an action later known as the “Emancipation Proclamation”); President Truman used an Executive Order to force the racial integration of the armed forces; President Eisenhower used one to force all federal contractors to post public notice of their nondiscrimination in hiring; Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used Executive Orders to require affirmative action in federal contracting and to ban racial discrimination in federal housing; and President Nixon used an Executive Order to create the EPA. In each of these circumstances, Executive Orders were used to cut through partisanship and implement important and needed changes. Furthermore, such Executive Orders often catalyzed media and public attention to the degree that they later persuaded Congress to endorse with eventual legislation. Bruce N. Reed, a special advisor to President Clinton, put it succinctly by stating that “in our experience, when the administration takes executive action, it not only leads to results while the political process is stuck in neutral, but it often spurs Congress to follow suit.” Analogously, Executive Orders, notes two political scientists, “facilitate innovations in the legislative process, codify ideological commitments, and drive social change.” XO solves best- 5 reasons France and the United States have presidential systems which give their nations’ highest elected official wide powers to conduct foreign and security policy. To different degrees, the division of responsibilities for both nations’ highest office reflects Wildavsky’s concept of “two-presidencies” in which one facet represents domestic policy and one represents foreign policy.1 In writing about the U.S. chief executive, Wildavsky summarized contemporary scholarship on the foreign policy powers of the presidency and identified five main reasons for the concentration of power: 1) since foreign policy and security issues often need “fast action”, the executive rather than the legislative branch of government is the more appropriate decision-making structure; 2) the Constitution grants the president broad formal powers; 3) because of the complexities involved voters tend to delegate to the president their “trust and confidence” to act; 4) the “interest group structure is weak, unstable and thin”; and 5) the legislature follows a “self-denying ordinance” since tradition and practicality reinforce the power of the chief executive.2 Wildavsky’s work is echoed by many scholars, including Logan, who contends that in Western democracies, “the mass public consciously or unconsciously cedes influence” to politicians and policy elites.3 NT No risk of nuclear terror Francis Gavin, Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs, Univeristy of Texas at Austin, "Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War," INTERNATIONAL SECURITY v. 34 n. 3, Winter 2009/2010, p. 19-20. Experts disagree on whether nonstate actors have the scientiªc, engineering, ªnancial, natural resource, security, and logistical capacities to build a nuclear bomb from scratch. According to terrorism expert Robin Frost, the danger of a “nuclear black market” and loose nukes from Russia may be overstated. Even if a terrorist group did acquire a nuclear weapon, delivering and detonating it against a U.S. target would present tremendous technical and logistical difficulties.51 Finally, the feared nexus between terrorists and rogue regimes may be exaggerated. As nuclear proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione argues, states such as Iran and North Korea are “not the most likely sources for terrorists since their stockpiles, if any, are small and exceedingly precious, and hence well-guarded.”52 Chubin states that there “is no reason to believe that Iran today, any more than Sadaam Hussein earlier, would transfer WMD weapons of mass destruction technology to terrorist groups like al-Qaida or Hezbollah.”53 B. worse case is unlikely—odds are high that terrorists will fail Francis Gavin, Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs, Univeristy of Texas at Austin, "Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War," INTERNATIONAL SECURITY v. 34 n. 3, Winter 2009/2010, p. 20. Even if a terrorist group were to acquire a nuclear device, expert Michael Levi demonstrates that effective planning can prevent catastrophe: for nuclear terrorists, what “can go wrong might go wrong, and when it comes to nuclear terrorism, a broader, integrated defense, just like controls at the source of weapons and materials, can multiply, intensify, and compound the possibilities of terrorist failure, possibly driving terrorist groups to reject nuclear terrorism altogether.” Warning of the danger of a terrorist acquiring a nuclear weapon, most analyses are based on the inaccurate image of an “infallible tenfoot- tall enemy.” This type of alarmism, writes Levi, impedes the development of thoughtful strategies that could deter, prevent, or mitigate a terrorist attack: “Worst-case estimates have their place, but the possible failure-averse, conservative, resource-limited ªve-foot-tall nuclear terrorist, who is subject not only to the laws of physics but also to Murphy’s law of nuclear terrorism, needs to become just as central to our evaluations of strategies.” C. will use conventional weapons STRATFOR, "Debunking Myths About Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism," 5-29-09, www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090528_debunking_myths_about_nuclear_weapons_and_terrorism, accessed 8-12-09. Though the history of the use of CBRN in terrorist attacks is limited, the fact of the matter is that most cases where groups have considered pursuing these capabilities have ultimately led to them being abandoned in favor of more obtainable and efficient tactics. They simply fall well short of the destruction wrought by simpler and more conventional explosive devices. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar and hour for hour of effort, high explosives are far more effective at inflicting massive casualties. The innovation of using hijacked civilian airliners as human-guided cruise missiles is far more in line with al Qaeda operational thinking than concepts of concentrating so much in easily targetable facilities for long periods of time. Doing so runs in the face of basic operational security considerations for any terrorist organization. D. terror groups know it’s too hard, won’t even try John Mueller, Professor, Political Science, Ohio State University, ATOMIC OBSESSION: NUCLEAR ALARMISM FROM HIROSHIMA TO AL-QAEDA, 2010, p. 163. In this spirit, Keller relays the response of then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge when asked what he worried about most: Ridge "cupped his hands prayerfully and pressed his fingertips to his lips. 'Nuclear,' he said simply." On cue, when the presidential candidates were specifically asked by Jim Lehrer in their first debate in September 2004 to designate the "single most serious threat to the national security of the United States," the candidates had no difficulty agreeing on one. It was, in George W. Bush's words, a nuclear weapon "in the hands of a terrorist enemy" Concluded Lehrer, "So it's correct to say the single most serious threat you believe, both of you believe, is nuclear proliferation?" George W. Bush: "In the hands of a terrorist enemy." John Kerry: "Weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation.... There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia.... there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates contends that every senior leader in the government is kept awake at night by "the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear."3 If there has been a "failure of imagination" over all these decades, however, perhaps it has been in the inability or unwillingness to consider the difficulties confronting the atomic terrorist. Thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes to go atomic, they, unlike generations of alarmed pundits, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful. Terrorists won’t use nukes – damages their causes Kapur 08 S. Paul – Assoc Prof in Dept of Strategic Research at the US Naval War College. “Nuclear Terrorism,” in The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia. Ed. Muthiah Alagappa. p. 324 Before a terrorist group can attempt to use nuclear weapons, it must meet two basic requirements. First, the group must decide that it wishes to engage in nuclear terrorism. Analysts and policy makers often assume that terrorist groups necessarily want to do so (Carter 2004; U.S. Government 2002). However, it is not clear that terrorist organizations would necessarily covet nuclear devices. Although analysts often characterize terrorism as an irrational activity (Laqeuer 1999: 4-5), extensive empirical evidence indicates that terrorist groups in fact be- have rationally, adopting strategies designed to achieve particular ends (Crenshaw 1995: 4; Pape 2003: 344). Thus whether terrorists would use nuclear weapons is contingent on whether doing so is likely to further their goals. Under what circumstances could nuclear weapons fail to promote terrorists' goals? For certain types of terrorist objectives, nuclear weapons could be too de- structive. Large-scale devastation could negatively influence audiences important to the terrorist groups. Terrorists often rely on populations sympathetic to their cause for political, financial, and military support. The horrific destruction of a nuclear explosion could alienate segments of this audience. People who otherwise would sympathize with the terrorists may conclude that in using a nuclear device terrorists had gone too far and were no longer deserving of support. The catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons could also damage or destroy the very thing that the terrorist group most values. For example, if a terrorist orga- nization were struggling with another group for control of their common home- land, the use of nuclear weapons against the enemy group would devastate the terrorists' own home territory. Using nuclear weapons would be extremely counter- productive for the terrorists in this scenario. It is thus not obvious that all terrorist groups would use nuclear weapons. Some groups would probably not. The propensity for nuclear acquisition and use by ter- rorist groups must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Won’t pursue nukes because of risk of detection Charles Ferguson, scientist-in-residence at Monterey Institute of International Studies, and William Potter, professor and director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies, 04, The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, p. http://www.nti.org/c_press/analysis_4faces.pdf A final disincentive to terrorists considering the option of nuclear terrorism could be that the planning, training, and acquisition of necessary capabilities might create unique "signatures," making them more vulnerable to discovery by intelligence operatives and law enforcement agents. In addition, since a nuclear terrorist incident would involve a terrorist group in novel, complex, technical, and untried activities, the potential for accidents and emergence of unforeseen problems would be much greater than what might be expected for more conventional terrorism. Most likely scenario is a dirty bomb. Con Coughlin, @ The Telegraph, 08 "Islamist militant groups want to carry out terror attacks on a massive scale, and there is no better way for them to achieve that objective than to develop some form of primitive nuclear device," said a senior U.S. security official. Impact is small. John Mueller, professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and Karl Mueller, assistant professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, May/June 1999, Foreign Affairs, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” p. Lexis Nuclear weapons clearly deserve the “weapons of mass destruction” designation because they can indeed destroy masses of people in a single blow. Even so, it is worth noting that any nuclear weapons acquired by terrorist groups or rogue states, at least initially, are likely to be small. Contrary to exaggerated Indian and Pakistani claims, for example, independent analyses of their May 1998 nuclear tests have concluded that the yields were Hiroshima-sized or smaller. Such bombs can cause horrible though not apocalyptic damage. Some 70,000 people died in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. People three miles away from the blast sites received only superficial wounds even when fully exposed, and those inside bomb shelters at Nagasaki were uninjured even though they were close to ground zero. Some buildings of steel and concrete survived, even when they were close to the blast centers, and most municipal services were restored within days. A Hiroshima-sized bomb exploded in a more fire-resistant modern city would likely be considerably less devastating. Used against well-prepared, dug-in, and dispersed troops, a small bomb might actually cause only limited damage. If a single such bomb or even a few of them were to fall into dangerous hands, therefore, it would be terrible, though it would hardly threaten the end of civilization. Bioterror risk is low—dispersal problems, tech barriers, risk fo back spread—experts agree John Mueller, Professor, Political Science, Ohio State University, OVERBLOWN: HOW POLITICIANS AND THE TERRORISM INDUSTRY INFLATE NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS, AND WHY WE BELIEVE THEM, 2009, p. 21-22. For the most destructive results, biological weapons need to be dispersed in very low-altitude aerosol clouds. Because aerosols do not appreciably settle, pathogens like anthrax (which is not easy to spread or catch and is not contagious) would probably have to be sprayed near nose level. Moreover, 90 percent of the microorganisms are likely to die during the process of aerosolization, and their effectiveness could be reduced still further by sunlight, smog, humidity, and temperature changes. Explosive methods of dispersion may destroy the organisms, and, except for anthrax spores, long-term storage of lethal organisms in bombs or warheads is difficult: even if refrigerated, most of the organisms have a limited lifetime. The effects of such weapons can take days or weeks to have full effect, during which time they can be countered with medical and civil defense measures. And their impact is very difficult to predict; in combat situations they may spread back onto the attacker. In the judgment of two careful analysts, delivering microbes and toxins over a wide area in the form most suitable for inflicting mass casualties—as an aerosol that can be inhaled—requires a delivery system whose development "would outstrip the technical capabilities of all but the most sophisticated terrorist" Even then effective dispersal could easily be disrupted by unfavorable environmental and meteorological conditions." After assessing, and stressing, the difficulties a nonstate entity would find in obtaining, handling, growing, storing, processing, and dispersing lethal pathogens effectively, biological weapons expert Milton Leitenberg compares his conclusions with glib pronouncements in the press about how biological attacks can be pulled off by anyone with "a little training and a few glass jars," or how it would be "about as difficult as producing beer." He sardonically concludes, "The less the commentator seems to know about biological warfare the easier he seems to think the task is."" | 9/28/13 |
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