Re: questions for discussion

Very insighful points.  I would say, regarding the duration of war that
the Stalingrad parallel is not a perfect one, since US air superiority is
far greater than anything the Germans enjoyed in late 1942, and because
the Germans did not have bunker-buster bombs (which the US used with great
success during the Gulf War).

Regarding the power of the UN - depends on how you define 'power'.  The UN
has no 'hard' power like the conventional state, but it's 'soft' power is
very real.  Failure to block a preemptive war on the part of the US will
cause a great decline in the legitimacy of international law and lead to
the proliferation of preemptive wars worldwide.  It is happening already.
Rather than challenging the US in the Security Council (which it would do
when it was a stronger power), Russia seeks alternative ways of containing
US unilateralism, namely threatening to go to war against Georgia (to
bring the old Soviet borderlands under control, to eliminate US military
presence [extant since 9/11] there, and to prevent the US from using it as
a staging point for the war against Iraq).  And of course the irrelevance
of the UN allows Israel to act with impunity (against the Palestinians and
possibly Lebanon as well).  As long as the UN was recognized as a force
to be reckoned with, this sort of proliferation of wars could be contained,
more or less.  It is true that the UN was specfically founded as a pillar
of US hegemony, but is there any future for it once the US jettisons it?
COuld the Europeans salvage it in the way they have been trying to salvage
Kyoto?

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bstremli@binghamton.edu