{"id":5,"date":"2003-03-02T17:42:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-02T17:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=5"},"modified":"2003-03-02T17:42:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-02T17:42:00","slug":"5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=5","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b><\/b>EMPIREWATCH<b><\/b> Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/\">NATION <\/a>magazine on Chris Matthews this morning. Clad in a mod-looking leather jacket and sharp black turtleneck, Vanden Heuvel claimed that the pending war with Iraq is &#8221; a turning point &#8221; for this nation in terms of becoming an empire and dismissed the President&#8217;s policy for democracy in post-Saddam Iraq as a cynical gesture. Setting aside the inherent weirdness of hearing the same rhetoric coming from the NATION as from Pat Buchanan, I think Vanden Heuvel is wrong regarding our intentions to establish democratic norms abroad. Since it is a position I have advocated in the<a href=\"http:\/\/hnn.us\/articles\/1103.html\"> past <\/a>I&#8217;m pleased to sdee the Bush administration move past the State Department and foreign policy elite preference for a Baathist-lite replacement for Saddam &#8211; a preference shared by France, Germany,Russia,the Saudis, Turkey and much of the autocratic Arab world. Genuine democracy and &#8211; importantly &#8211; a commitment to bringing American-style individual rights to Iraq will also send a message to Arafat that the U.S. is serious about not being a midwife to establishing a PLO dictatorship when an independent Palestine becomes a reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EMPIREWATCH Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of the NATION magazine on Chris Matthews this morning. Clad in a mod-looking leather jacket and sharp black turtleneck, Vanden Heuvel claimed that the pending war with Iraq is &#8221; a turning point &#8221; for this nation in terms of becoming an empire and dismissed the President&#8217;s policy for democracy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}