Word: argumentative
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...hasn't done very much to bring about peace in the Middle East; in fact, it has allowed a bad situation to grow worse. And it was misleading because a stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community...
...There are moral, ideological and political arguments for Bush's reluctance to "engage." The moral argument is simple, strong and simplistic: Yasser Arafat is an evildoer who has never intended to make peace. He winks at terrorism; he tries to purchase arms from the Iranians. He flirts with peace, then flees. The ideological argument has the subtlety of a punch in the nose: it is based in the Sharon-Likud conceit that Arabs "only understand" strength. This has a certain resonance with tough guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney. America's Likudnik tilt has empowered the Sharon government to preside over...
...Such evidence won't necessarily help the U.S. make the political case that Saddam represents an imminent menace that must be preemptively dealt with. The strongest argument on that front is one that might be called North Korea-in-reverse: Saddam must be stopped from going nuclear, because if he attains atomic weapons then the West will find itself liable to the same sort of blackmail from Baghdad that it is currently forced to swallow from Pyongyang. A compelling argument, indeed, if it could be shown that Iraq is in danger of going nuclear. But the nuclear dimension...
...argument that the Bush administration is simply after Iraq’s vast oil resources is unconvincing, he said...
...feel threatened by such wording," says Ludger Volmer, foreign affairs spokesman for the Green Party, and they dislike identifying an enemy with evil, oneself with good. "Politicians here," says Gerald Duchaussoy, 27, a Paris office worker, "don't speak with his language." Many Europeans have no patience with the argument that Bush is adopting a tough-guy posture to make sure Saddam knows he means business. A former British cabinet minister in the pro-American Conservative Party leaned over toward a TIME correspondent at lunch recently to say he considered Bush "terrifying," "ignorant," "a prisoner of the religious right...