Girding for battle (continued)

Jessica T. Mathews

There are three crucial issues: North Korea, Iran, and the future of the [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)] regime. And in North Korea and Iran, the administration simply has to make a choice about whether it’s going to continue to be torn between engaging enough to solve these two problems, or hanging on to the hopes of a forced regime change or a regime collapse. And in both cases, [the Bush administration] has basically incapacitated [itself] for the last four years, so that even when diplomatic efforts have been made, they get undercut by one player or another — in the case of North Korea — so that progress doesn’t get made. The result has been four very long years of progress in both countries toward nuclear capability, in all likelihood, and that’s been extraordinarily costly.

I would define the collapse of the nonproliferation regime as a nuclear calamity. I think that the chances of that are significant.

The other thing, that I think would have the same result, would be a US attack on Iran. My head tells me it won’t happen because I think it’s so obviously a terrible idea. But I felt that way about Iraq too.

I think among the consequences of attacking Iran would be that Iran would certainly leave the [NPT review process] — and then it might easily provoke several other countries to follow — and also to feel like the only protection against the US attack would be to go nuclear. And for some of them, you know — Saudi Arabia might be able to get a bomb from Pakistan, Egypt might be able to push a program ahead — I think you would be looking at a very, very ugly situation. And no possible way to prevent Iran, over a long period of time, if we attacked it, [from going] nuclear.

Jessica T. Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States.

Dan Becker

Four more years of Flat Earth Society global-warming policy. Actually, I’m being unfair. It vacillates between Flat Earth Society and ostrich-like. Sometimes they deny the truth and sometimes they just stick their head in the sand about it.

The Bush administration wants to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for a six-month shot of oil. They want to allow the timber industry to cut down the last remaining ancient forests in the United States to produce veneer for coffee tables. They want to build, they said, 1300 more power plants, coal and nuclear.

Dan Becker is the director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program.

Cheryl Jacques

The optimistic side of me is actually hopeful that this president will start worrying about his legacy and will not want to be on the wrong side of history with regard to promoting discrimination and division in this country.

My pessimistic side is concerned that this is a president who is extremely beholden to his extreme conservative base. This is a president who thought nothing of using mean-spirited and divisive issues to win this election. And he may continue that mantra of dividing and using gay families as a political wedge issue. Ken Mehlman, who was a top Bush operative, is now the head of the Republican National Committee, and he is quoted as saying that they’re going to use the same strategies in the midterm elections, to win congressional seats, that they used to win the White House.

Gay issues are not partisan issues. That’s the losing strategy short-term, and it’s definitely a losing strategy long-term, because the Republican Party will be soiled with the reputation of being on the wrong side of history.

Cheryl Jacques is a lawyer with the Boston firm Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten. The former Massachusetts state senator is a national civil-rights leader, and recently served as president of the nation’s largest gay-and-lesbian organization, the Human Rights Campaign.

Ralph Nader

Bush will push our democracy down and down as far as we let him do it. I mean, he has very little self-restraint. It’s all about big business, and big-business control and dominance of our political economy. So you can’t say he’s got any self-restraint. He doesn’t have to be re-elected again.

And so his speech illustrates what a messianic, aggressive militarist he is. It was a grotesque demonstration of political hypocrisy — between his rhetoric on the inaugural stand and his record over the last four years. The speech was laced with liberty, freedom, and democracy, right? What about the Patriot Act and the way John Ashcroft enforced it, taking away a lot of liberty? Invasion of privacy, search and seizure, arrest without charges, incarceration without lawyers, abuse of prisoners. Second, he’s in DC, and he has refused to support the residents of DC having voting rights in Congress — while he’s pushing for elections in Iraq. Third, he’s trying to take away our right to sue against wrongdoers in court, without having judges and jurors handcuffed by federal legislation. The fourth is, we don’t have free elections, because they’re all sullied by money and shenanigans in vote-counting. Big money has corrupted our elections. He supported corporate globalization, which is about as suppressive of freedom as can be imagined in the economic sector. Remember, it was George Soros who said [that] multinational corporations are the biggest threat to democracy today in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Impeachment, regardless of the odds. We have an impeachment petition on our Web site. I mean, Clinton was impeached for lying about sex, and Bush plunged our nation into a brutal war without end based on a platform of fabrications, deceptions, and lies.

Ralph Nader was a presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004. On Saturday, January 29, his End the Iraq War and Occupation Tour will make two stops in Boston, at the First Parish Unitarian Church, in Harvard Square, and at the Middle East Downstairs, in Cambridge.

Gloria Feldt

There is a war on choice. A little recognized war on choice, and choice in the broadest sense, not just abortion, but family planning, medically accurate sex education, and access to all kinds of reproductive-health care.

This is the first time in our history that the White House, both houses of Congress, and, increasingly, the federal courts have all been aligned in lock step, ready to take away our childbearing decisions. And it’s a very ironic thing that it’s the so-called conservatives that are wanting the government in your bedroom and in your personal life and making decisions for you about something as personal as childbearing.

Get involved in the grassroots. We won reproductive rights in a sense, from the top down, through court decisions, the first time. And I believe we have to win them again, from the bottom up, from the grassroots.

Gloria Feldt is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the author of The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How To Fight Back (Bantam Dell).