Abstract

Minority Report

Nothing has been more dismal, in a political year that has seen the U.S. Democratic Party decline into irrelevance at a hypnotic rate, than the decision of the party leadership to cede "the high ground" in foreign policy to U.S. President George Bush. In some unfathomably crass fashion, the entire apparatus has bought the line, fed partly by its pollsters and partly by its own parochialism, that Americans do not care about the rest of the world. A defining moment, occurred recently. The U.S. State Department intervened vigorously to prevent Americans from traveling to northern Iraq, in official or unofficial capacity, in order to observe the first free elections ever to be held in Kurdistan. This piece of cynicism was justified on the grounds that U.S. passports were invalid for travel to Iraq under the "sanctions" policy and that Americans should not be interfering in Iraqi internal affairs. At once, the entire moral case for Desert Storm, a case that has been decaying to the point of rot in any event, simply blows away.