306 Gt Nuclear Neg Elections Supplement

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

Nuke Neg – Elections Supplement Nuke Neg – Elections Supplement..........................................................................................................................1 2NC Uniqueness Wall (1/2).....................................................................................................................................2 2NC Uniqueness Wall (2/2).....................................................................................................................................3 2NC Link Wall (1/2)................................................................................................................................................4 2NC Link Wall (2/2)................................................................................................................................................5 2NC A2: Unpopular Link Turn................................................................................................................................6 2NC A2: Obama Will Spin......................................................................................................................................7 2NC Impact Overview.............................................................................................................................................8 2NC A2: McCain Won’t Strike (1/2).......................................................................................................................9 2NC A2: McCain Won’t Strike (2/2).....................................................................................................................10 2NC A2: Bush Will Strike......................................................................................................................................11

1

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC Uniqueness Wall (1/2) 1. Obama’s winning now – that’s Ward – prefer our evidence – A. cites a political scientist at Virginia, which is better than a random columnist. B. assumes the most relevant polling data – ¾ voters prefer Obama’s position on energy, the key issue. 2. Energy is key to the election – polling proves. Tom Raum, AP staff writer, 6/23/2008, Gas at $4 brings promises, pandering, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isJU4OyzZglXxAWlzkvmnslNP3-wD91FUOI00 [ND] Obama and McCain have made high gas prices a top issue in their campaigns and have offered dueling remedies aimed at easing them. Their positions are being echoed daily by their surrogates on Capitol Hill. And both make it sound as if only their proposals would chart the path to lower fuel prices and a final cure for what President Bush once labeled the nation's addiction to foreign oil. This debate is certain to get louder as the November election approaches. In a USA Today-Gallup Poll released Monday, nine in 10 people said energy, including gas prices, would be very or extremely important in deciding their presidential vote in November, tying it with the economy as the top issue. People said Obama would do a better job than McCain on energy issues by 19 percentage points.

3. Obama Leads Polls Martina Stewart, CNN Associate Producer, 6-16-08, CNN, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/16/poll-majority-believe-obama-will-win-general-election/ In a new Gallup survey, Obama leads McCain by eleven percentage points – 52 percent to McCain’s 41 percent – on the question of who Americans believe will win the White House this November. Seventy-six percent of Democrats believe Obama will win while 67 percent of Republicans believe McCain will keep the presidency in their party. Although both men enjoy support from independent voters, more independents believe Obama will beat McCain with 50 percent of the critical group believing Obama will take the White House and 41 percent believing McCain will.

4. Obama winning swing states. Andrew Sullivan, Staff Writer, The Sunday Times, 6-29-08 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article4231204.eceopenComment=true “We’re going in to win [these states],” Hildebrand insisted. And this may not be a total delusion. Two polls have just put Obama a hefty 15 points ahead of McCain (although Gallup shows a resiliently close contest). Plus a raft of new polls in key swing states show big Obama gains in recent weeks. In Minnesota his lead is now an impressive 17 points; in Wisconsin 13 points; in Michigan six points; and in Colorado five.

2

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC Uniqueness Wall (2/2) 5. McCain’s associated with the unpopularity of the Bush administration – Iraq and economy. Michael Connery, Yahoo News, 6/24/08, “Even ‘Maverick McCain’ Can’t Connect With Young Voters” http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080624/cm_thenation/769332309 I've long worried that John McCain could be, as Arianna Huffington put it yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, a "Trojan Horse" candidate for the GOP. His perceived status as a maverick and his cultural savvy has long inoculated him from the troubles plaguing the Republican Party and boosted his image among young voters. Out of all the GOP contenders, he seemed most capable of reviving the Republican brand among a generation trending heavily Democratic. According to a new poll by Democracy Corps, that image of McCain the Maverick has shattered. Since Democracy Corps' last survey in April, John McCain's favorable ratings among young voters has dropped from 34 to 30%, and his unfavorable ratings have jumped over ten points, rising from 37 to 49%. Two of the supposedly biggest advantages a McCain candidacy brings to the GOP - his popularity with independents and his "liberal" views on immigration reform - also took serious hits in recent months. Among independent young voters, McCain's unfavorable rating nearly doubled, rising from 27% in April to 49% in June, and among Hispanics his unfavorable rating is now a whopping 70%. Apparently McCain's "principled" stand on immigration during the primaries was not enough to pull Hispanics back towards the Republican Party. According to the report, McCain's favorable/unfavorable numbers now mirror those of the Republican Party, which has seen its brand collapse among young voters in the past two years: In a head to head match-up against Barack Obama, McCain loses the youth vote 66 - 33% among likely voters, a larger margin than Democrats enjoyed during the wave election of 2006. What happened to McCain the Maverick? How did his highly-cultivated independent brand crash so fast? Democracy Corps points to the transformation of McCain into "McSame," a typical politician tied to the failures of the Bush Presidency and the Republican Party. That notion has gained great traction in recent months, in particular around the issues of Iraq and the economy, the two most pressing issues in the eyes of young voters and two areas in which McCain is most tightly tied to the policies of the Bush Administration and the GOP. According to Democracy Corps, when McCain's policies on Iraq and the economy are laid before young voters, along with potential consequences for young Americans, a majority of young voters (60 - 65%) express serious to very serious doubts about McCain's candidacy. As long as McCain holds policy positions simlar to Bush and the GOP on those two major policy issues, and as long as Democrats, bloggers, and activists continue to explain the consequences of those policies to young voters, it's hard to see how McCain can recover his maverick status and gain ground among young voters.

3

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC Link Wall (1/2) 1. Extend Caldwell – McCain will seize the opportunity of alternative energy to spin it as his own creation. He’ll say nuke power was his idea and use it to break Obama’s key lead in energy by revitalizing the GOP’s image. Plan would give McCain a chance to openly declare his support for legislation which stops warming and provides energy independence – guarantees new support. 2. McCain loves nuke power – Obama opposes. Joshua Simmons, economics senior and the executive director of the Florida Federation of College Republicans, 6/15/08, The Independent Florida Alligator “Liberals have it wrong on energy policy” http://www.alligator.org/articles/2008/07/15/opinion/columns/080715_col1.txt [Mills] Besides tapping the billions of barrels of oil under American soil and just offshore, the mere suggestion of which sends liberals into fits, perhaps the most obvious solution to securing both stable oil prices and energy independence lies deep within the atom. Hardly one-fifth of America’s electricity comes from nuclear sources, far less than Europe and soon even China. To this end, Sen. John McCain has proposed building 45 new nuclear power plants in America, while Sen. Barack Obama has simply stated that he is “not a nuclear energy proponent.” This anxious, idealistic attitude lies at the base of most liberal proposals on the issue. All Americans want greater energy independence and lower energy prices, but conservatives seem to be the only ones presenting logical, realistic policy proposals for attaining them.

3. McCain’s separating himself from Obama – he’ll take credit and spin Obama as Dr. No. Maria Gavrilovic; 7-11-08; “Obama To Focus on Energy Security Today” CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/07/11/politics/fromtheroad/entry4250866.shtml (CHICAGO) Barack Obama will focus on energy security today at a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio. Obama will accuse the Bush Administration and John McCain of lacking a long term energy plan, and will argue that the dependence on foreign oil poses a threat to national security. Both McCain and Obama have been squabbling about their respective energy plans for months now. Yesterday McCain called Obama the “Dr. No” on energy policy. “He's against nuclear power. He's against the storing of spent nuclear fuel and he's against reprocessing. He's against offshore drilling. He's against offering a reward for the development of an electric car,” McCain said, “He's against everything we need to do in order to make this nation energy independent.” The Obama campaign released an ad earlier this week accusing McCain of cozying up with oil and gas companies. "On gas prices, John McCain's part of the problem," the narrator says, "McCain and Bush support a drilling plan that won't produce a drop of oil for seven years. McCain will give more tax breaks to big oil. He's voted with Bush 95 percent of the time."

4. New jobs spin. The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Pa, 7/24/08. “McCain Touts Energy Policies,” http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2432549&title=McCain_Touts_Energy.html Mr. McCain didn't shy away from touting proposals sure to draw fire: nuclear energy and clean-coal technology. While he favors wind and solar power as alternative energy sources, Mr. McCain said building 45 new nuclear power plants could create 700,000 new jobs. He promised to invest $2 billion a year in clean-coal technology -- the conversion of coal into diesel gasoline or other fuels -- because the nation has the largest untapped coal reserve in the world. A clean-coal plant is proposed in Schuylkill County. Environmentalists criticize both technologies as potentially harmful, but Mr. McCain said the nation's military has been powering its submarines with nuclear fuel for 60 years without an accident. "Eighty percent of French electricity is generated by nuclear power. We always want to imitate the French," he joked, alluding to some Americans' distaste for France's opposition to the war in Iraq.

4

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC Link Wall (2/2) 5. Battleground States – Nuclear power is key to McCain winning supporters in crucial swing states – voters want lower energy prices. T.W. Budig, ECM Capitol reporter, 7/28/08. “CAPITOL VIEWS: Republicans may be saying right things to voters weary of high energy prices,” http://hometownsource.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5833&Itemid=29 Republicans may be saying the right things to voters weary of high energy prices. Last week a Quinnipiac University/Wall Street Journal/washingtonpost.com poll showed that Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain had closed the gap between himself and Sen. Barack Obama in four battleground states — capturing a lead in Colorado. In Minnesota the poll, which is generally credited as valid, shows Obama and McCain basically tied. The pollsters opined that McCain’s traction might be the result of his energy policies — he has argued for a federal gas tax “holiday” or temporary suspension, for one thing. They reported that in Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, voters viewed energy policy as more important than the Iraq War and supported expanded oil drilling offshore and in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. It might be wondered, assuming the pollsters are correct, to what degree the Energy as King mentality is impacting other races. For instance, 6th Congressional District Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, recently returned from an energy tour she took with other Republican freshman that had her admiring the caribou as they huddled around oil pipes in Alaska. Bachmann is gung ho on expanding drilling onto the outer continental shelf, drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge, building more nuclear power plants, developing wind and solar power — the latter two she views as the future of energy. Eyes Alaskan oil fields She’s fond of pointing to the remoteness of the distant Alaskan oil fields, saying for several months of the years the region is cloaked in darkness. No one will see the drilling anyway, perhaps. In what may cause some of the old congressional bulls to perk up their ears, Bachmann blames Congress for the country’s energy woes. With public’s approval of Congress abysmally low, it’s not likely she meets too many people who say she’s wrong, wrong, wrong, on that. This may not hold true with other views. Bachmann’s proposing legislation to speed up the application process for energy exploration and even proposed a special court to handle lawsuits arising from disputes over the Alaskan oil fields. She’s not interested in Congress requiring automobile manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency standards, arguing Congress should not play a role in the decision. Democrats use similar language as Republicans when talking energy. Still, they don’t necessarily give the impression they have the kids in the backyard sniffing around the hostas for the scent of oil. Sixth Congressional District DFL candidate Elwyn Tinklenberg like other Democrats talks of full exploration of existing leased lands before expanding the hunt for oil and gas to new areas. He styled Bachmann’s proposal for expediting the approval process for permits as unMinnesotan — power slamming things through before the locals can have a say. Franken reserves judgment U.S. Senate DFL candidate Al Franken, asked by a reporter not long ago about building additional nuclear power plants, Franken indicated he wanted to reserve judgment. He expressed concern over the storage of nuclear waste. “I would like to see us make more progress on

the issue of storage — I really would,” said Franken. McCain, for one, harbors no such doubts. He wants America to build 45 new nuclear power plants — the waste can be handled, he argues. U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-St. Paul, also has indicated supports for additional nuclear power plants. Democrats like depicting “Big Oil” as oozing renegade profits and filling the campaign chests of Republicans with dollars reeking of the need for something — the furnace, anyway — to be cleaned. But the Quinnipiac University poll suggests that Republicans might be telling a more compelling energy story than at least Sen. Obama in four key battleground states. Voters may be looking for an energy policy matching the way many Midwesterners seem to like to drive — floor it.

6. Energy independence spin – using an economic and national security lens wins the election. James Pethokoukis, money and politics columnist for US News & World Report, where he writes the monthly Capital Commerce magazine column, 6/16/2008, 7 Ways McCain Can Use Energy to Beat Obama, http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capitalcommerce/2008/6/16/7-ways-mccain-can-use-energy-to-beat-obama.html "Climate change is never going to rise to the status of a top-tier political issue" is how one top climate-policy expert recently described the political lay of the land to me. Just take a look at the results of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The top issue for voters (27 percent) was job creation and economic growth. Right behind was the war in Iraq (24 percent). Then came energy and gas prices (18 percent). Far down the list were the environment and global warming, at a minuscule 4 percent. So despite all the media attention on global warming as an existential threat to humanity, it still scores a bit below illegal immigration in the hierarchy of voter concerns. And there lies an opportunity for John McCain to turn the issues of energy and the environment to his advantage in his race against Barack Obama. Here are a few pieces of advice for Team McCain that I have gathered after talking to some political folks in recent days. 1) Stop talking about global warming. Or at least don't talk about it nearly as much as "energy independence." The latter has an incredible resonance with voters for national security and economic reasons. The former, apparently, not so much. In his muchderided New Orleans speech, McCain mentioned "climate" or "environment" a total of four times, "energy" eight times. Since voters seem to be about four times as concerned with the cost of energy as with climate change, maybe the ratio of "energy" mentions to "climate change" mentions should be at least 4 to 1 rather than 2 to 1 in all speeches. Move energy from being an environmental issue to being an economic and national security issue.

5

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC A2: Unpopular Link Turn 2/3 of the public support nuclear energy – safe, environmentally-friendly and good for the economy St. Petersburg Times (Florida), 7/7/08. “ADVOCATE GOES FROM NATURE TO NUCLEAR,” Lexis Polls are pretty clear that about two-thirds of the people support nuclear energy and think it should be part of the future. The closer people live to the nuclear plants the more supportive they are of nuclear energy. There's about 80 percent support within 10 miles of the plant. There are three reasons for that. One, they know it's safe because they live there and it's never hurt them. Two, the air is clean and compared to living near a coal plant they know it's not causing any environmental damage. And third, it's a huge economic generator. They employ about twice as many people as a coal plant and they employ higher-skilled and higher-paid people than a coal plant.

Public opinion supports plan. Adam Solomon, 2-26-06, Harvard political review, Is nuclear energies day here? http://hprsite.squarespace.com/is-nuclear-energys-day-here/ The last two decades have seen a considerable shift in public opinion. According to a 1990 Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans opposed building new nuclear power plants. By contrast, a poll done in May 2005 by Bisconti Research, Inc. for the Nuclear Energy Institute found that 58 percent of those polled supported building new plants. A Gallup Poll conducted in March 2005 corroborates this shift, showing that 54 percent either somewhat or strongly favor the use of nuclear energy in the United States . In an interview with the HPR, Mitch Singer of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) highlighted the spotless safety record of American nuclear power plants as a main contributor to warming public attitude. Even at Three Mile Island , the closest America has ever come to experiencing a meltdown, the damage was entirely psychological. According to Singer, “Never has one death been attributed to nuclear power plants” in America . The greatest factor contributing to nuclear energy’s revival may be the growing concern over global climate change. Greenpeace coFounder James Lovelock caused a stir in the environmentalist community when he was quoted as saying, “Only nuclear power can halt global warming.” No other type of renewable clean energy can compete with nuclear energy to relieve dependence on fossil fuels. According to the NEI, nuclear power plants accounted for 73 percent of U.S. emission-free generation. Nuclear energy’s improving popularity is pivotal to its expansion. Henry Lee, a Lecturer on Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, told the HPR that the “worst mistake would be to jam nuclear power down people’s throats.” He emphasizes that nuclear power will be successful only with popular support, or at least with the absence of virile opposition—and the data suggest that the people are ready for expanding nuclear energy.

6

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC A2: Obama Will Spin Obama plans to exclude nuclear power from his energy policy. Daniel Koffler, staff writer for the Guardian, 7/8/08 “The Case for Nuclear Power” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/08/nuclearpower.energy [Mills] Nuclear power, however, does not figure into Obama's proposed alternatives to reliance on petroleum. On the contrary, he used the Las Vegas setting to hammer home, literally, his objection to McCain's proposal for the construction of 45 new nuclear power plants - a touchy subject in Nevada, given that the only site the US department of energy has designated for the storage of nuclear waste in the continental US (under the Clinton administration, incidentally) is the repository at Yucca Mountain, about 130 km from metropolitan Las Vegas. Now, to be clear, Obama's energy programme on the whole is a sound and long-overdue, if not terribly ambitious, adjustment in the US approach to fuelling its economy. McCain's programme, by contrast, is a counterproductive, incoherent mash. But on the specific issue of nuclear power, McCain is exactly right, and Obama is badly wrong. Nuclear power is green in multiple senses. The most important criterion by which to judge any viable alternative to petroleum is the magnitude of its contribution to global warming. Well, uranium or petroleum fission produces no carbon emissions whatsoever, since there is no carbon involved. The cooling process does produce water vapour, but water vapour and carbon dioxide are both greenhouse gases in the same sense that Roger Federer and I are both tennis players (and water vapour emissions, moreover, can be controlled). The environmental downsides of nuclear power are therefore not any more severe than other alternative energy sources, such as wind or solar power, and are arguably less severe than biofuels like the ethanol that Obama heartily supports. These energy sources all entail waste heat, produce solid waste and have other drawbacks - but the environmental drawbacks of all of them, nukes included, are quite modest. From a fiscal perspective, nuclear power enjoys enormous advantages over other environmentally friendly energies. At their present state of technological development, nuclear reactors can already power large industrial societies. Wind and solar power are not there yet, and biofuels (particularly ethanol) are something of an embarrassing racket, being extraordinarily inefficient and requiring huge government subsidies to be propped up. The case for nuclear power is even stronger when considering the weakness of the case against it, which rests largely on a series of panics 20 to 30 years old. For example, the Chernobyl disaster was the product of horrific Soviet mismanagement over the many years prior to the meltdown, followed by equally abysmal crisis management. It simply had nothing to do with the upkeep challenges of a modern nuclear plant. Worries about the impact of radioactive waste, by contrast, are at least marginally connected to real features of current nuclear plants, but they are wildly overblown. For one thing, the vast majority of nuclear waste - as much as 95% or more - can be reprocessed and reused, making it a truly renewable resource. For another, the technology required to render radioactive waste inert and harmless already exists, and it ought to be largely perfected by the time any new plants go online. Then there are the silly and borderline mystical grounds for opposition to nuclear power, about which the less said the better (but let's be indulgent). Nuclear power plants, as the anti-nuclear movement frequently points out, use the same fuel sources and much of the same science as nuclear weapons. But that makes them as much like nuclear weapons as heart medications containing nitroglycerin are like dynamite. Alternatively, some anti-nuclear activists treat all nuclear technology as some sort of inherent transgression against nature. That argument relies on deeply reactionary concepts of "naturalness" and "unnaturalness" that also form the basis of opposition to any number of technologies that improve the quality of human life in countless ways. The argument against nuclear power as unnatural deserves no more or less respect than the arguments against childhood vaccination and stem-cell research as unnatural. Whatever else can be said about them, such sentiments have precious little to do with environmentalism. Obama, however, brushed aside nuclear power as a policy option in approximately one half of one sentence in his speech, on grounds different from and even worse than any of the foregoing. McCain's "proposal to build 45 new nuclear reactors without a plan to store the waste some place other than right here at Yucca Mountain" makes no sense, Obama told the Las Vegas crowd. But did Obama propose some other site for storing nuclear waste or offer some further argument against nuclear power? No, he just dropped the subject. In other words, even as he rightly mocked the risible gimmicks McCain has cobbled together as an ersatz energy policy, Obama's opposition to nuclear energy, in its entirety, is nothing more than a naked pander for Nevada's five electoral votes. For a politician ostensibly committed to environmentalism in general and curbing global warming in particular, omitting nuclear power from his energy programme - let alone doing so on no principle higher than grabbing votes - is irresponsible

7

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC Impact Overview A Republican win in November guarantees military strikes on Iran – McCain is intent on projecting power in the Middle East and his neocon counselors will push for it. His entire career is based on the military and national security. That’s Edwards and Kane. And, strikes outweigh – A. McCain has openly called to bomb Iran – he’s publicly told supporters that there’s inevitably going to be other wars and openly jokes about it by singing Beach Boys songs. Even just a conventional strike would spark retaliatory measures, drawing in Iraq and Israel into the conflict with their nukes – ensures destruction. That’s Hirsch. B. The nuclear threshold is a line of no return- U.S. response of new nuclear doctrine would shatter NPT confidence – countries rush to develop their own deterrent – means spreading nuclear six-shooters among new countries and the best internal link to Utgoff. C. Turns the case – 1. Warming – A. Having to focus on the war-time economy means industries will ignore the environment and emit GHGs to produce weapons and supplies. B. Democratic victory is key to action on global warming – failure ensures global inaction and extinction Workface, Climate & Energy Report, August 2006, http://www.workfacelimited.co.uk/html/cande_200608_total.html The potential of climate change to affect the future of all life on earth is huge, and so are the difficulties involved in dealing with it. The science is uncertain and the costs are hard to determine. The survey will examine whether it is worth trying to stop the climate changing and how the world might go about it. The climate has not changed much so far, though we are already seeing some effects—more frequent heatwaves and hurricanes. But it’s going to change more in the future. Some of the effect will be welcome – for example, oil and gas resources in the Arctic, which account for a quarter of the world's total, will become more easily accessible. Other consequences are alarming: if the whole of Greenland's ice-cap melts, sea levels will rise by six metres, flooding coastal cities. For business, Hurricane Katrina last year demonstrated how expensive climate change could be, with the insurance sector being hit particularly badly. But attitudes throughout the business world have been changing anyway, for three reasons. Companies believe that governments will act to mitigate climate change, and want to be part of that process. They also see new markets opening up, mostly in cleaner technologies. And they believe that consumers are concerned about global warming, so they want to show concern too. But business will go green only if governments give it the incentive to do so. And, because it deals with consequences across borders and across generations, climate change is the most difficult policy issue that governments have ever had to deal with. America is the key. America, the

world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, refused to sign the Kyoto protocol, the first serious attempt to deal with this problem. But attitudes are changing in America. The Bush administration now accepts that climate change is real, though it still insists that it is best dealt with by supporting cleaner technologies rather than by controlling carbon emissions. But a Democratic president would almost certainly take a different view, and some Republicans are also leaning towards controls. If America moves, then there’s a chance that the big emitters in the developing world, China and India, will also take action. If it doesn’t, they won’t. While opinion in both business and politics is clearly swinging towards the idea that the world must deal with climate change, the complexities of reaching global agreement on how and when to do it are immense. This survey will lay out the debate as only The Economist can: it will set aside the sacred cows and entrenched positions, it will bring together ideas from a broad range of disciplines, and it will get to the heart of the most critical issues. Read the full survey on climate change in The Economist. Available at newsstands from 8th September.

2. Prolif – U.S. strikes would accelerate prolif by making countries uneasy – Hirsch says when countries feel at risk, they prolif. Launching missiles at Iran would freak not only the Middle East but every country when they see how crazy the world’s biggest nuclear power is. 3. Econ – strikes would destabilize global markets and increase price volatility by shutting off a key import and export market.

8

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC A2: McCain Won’t Strike (1/2) 1. Our evidence assumes McCain’s press release – our ev actually bases likelihood based on his past actions and behaviors. He’s a wartime president who jokes about bombing Iran – it’s a certainty. 2. He’d still attack – bottom of the card says he’s a realist – pressures of relative gains would force the issue and he’d strike. 3.McCain is absolutely committed to rogue state rollback – he’ll force the issue and strike Iran. Matthew Yglesias, Associate Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, The American Prospect, 4-28-08, http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_militarist But despite McCain's loss in 2000, the strategic concepts he outlined back in 1999 came to be at the core of what we today term the Bush doctrine. Most significant is the emphasis on preventive war as a tool of policy. As outlined in McCain's disquisition on North Korea, the fact that some state does not, in fact, pose an imminent threat to the United States is no reason to refrain from attacking it. On the contrary, the fact that a state is nonthreatening is a reason to attack it as soon as possible, lest it become more powerful over time. In Bush's hands, this concept has led not only to the fiasco in Iraq but also to North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons and to several missed opportunities to secure the verifiable disarmament of Iran. McCain has pushed this doctrine longer, harder, and more consistently than has Bush. In the spring of 2002, when the Bush administration was still formally committed to reinvigorating the inspections process in Iraq, McCain was planted firmly on the administration's right flank, offering a strident call for regime change in Baghdad. In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, McCain explicitly drew the links between his 1999 rollback vision and the disastrous course on which Bush was about to embark the nation, saying proudly that "several years ago, I and many others argued that the United States, in concert with willing allies, should work to undermine from within and without outlaw regimes." Now, he said, the president had articulated a policy wherein "dictators that support and harbor terrorists and build [nuclear, chemical, or biological] weapons are now on notice that such behavior is, in itself, a casus belli. Nowhere is such an ultimatum more applicable than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq." At a time when politicians were bowing to the pressure to support the war but also offering careful caveats, McCain did the reverse. He went further than even Bush in predicting that the liberation of Baghdad "will serve as a counterpoint to the state-directed Arab media's distortion of the Palestinian conflict," embracing the view, then popular on the neoconservative fringe, that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. Likewise, McCain advanced the idea that remaking Iraq as a democracy "cannot be the end" of an American effort to reorder political conditions throughout the Middle East. This commitment is precisely the blunder that led the United States to compound the error of invading Iraq by later spurning peace offerings from Iran and rejecting all entreaties to make a serious effort at stabilizing the regional situation through engagement with Iraq's neighbors. And of course it's the same commitment that has led to repeated outbursts of anti-Iranian saber-rattling from the Bush administration, as the hawk faction with which McCain has consistently aligned himself threatens to seize control of the policy agenda and plunge the country into a new conflict. *** Optimistic liberals note that McCain has shown some capacity to change his mind, and that he has expanded his circle of advisers beyond the core group of neoconservative fanatics. But despite the disaster of Iraq, McCain remains as committed to a far-right vision of American foreign policy as ever. Well-known campaign "gaffes," like when he sang "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," are more than verbal fumbles on the part of a 71-year-old man? they are expressions of views McCain articulates with regularity. While Bush has been criticized for advancing an unduly broad conception of the terrorism problem, allowing Iraq, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah to all be swept together with al-Qaeda, McCain sees a need to go even bigger. In a May 2007 speech to the Hoover Institution, McCain explained that the so-called war on terror is merely part of a "worldwide political, economic, and philosophical struggle between the future and the past, between progress and reaction, and between liberty and despotism." The despotism problem, in McCain's view, goes beyond the traditional axis of evil and requires us to not only "not put pressure on dictators in Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, and other pariah states" but also to fret that Russia and China have joined forces to block such pressure. At a time when the Bush administration has to some extent backed away from rogue-state rollback, McCain has decided to double down, concluding that the rogue-state problem can't be resolved until all autocratic powers are brought down. "Iran is able to aggressively pursue nuclear weapons and hegemony in the Persian Gulf," he said in the Hoover speech, "in part, because it has been shielded by the world's powerful autocracies." To combat this alleged conspiracy of dictatorships, McCain has proposed creating a "worldwide League of Democracies," whose role would be to create an alternative mechanism to the United Nations that could facilitate coercive action "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval." His campaign Web site further ups the ante for conflict with Russia and China by going beyond the standard missile defense mumbo jumbo to describe his planned shield as intended to "hedge against potential threats from possible

9

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN strategic competitors like Russia and China," in contrast to a Bush administration which has limited its shield rhetoric to rogue states. McCain would take an impractical and somewhat provocative idea and then make it worse by injecting additional

2NC A2: McCain Won’t Strike (2/2) provocation for no real reason. At Hoover, McCain referred to his foreign-policy agenda as a "vision of a new era of enduring peace based on freedom," but it's clear that his policies will lead to more conflict than peace. Some of McCain's ideas are so unrealistic that it's hard to know what they would amount to in practice -- for example, there's no indication that any countries are eager to sign up for his League of Democracies. But a policy of rogue-state rollback would be a recipe for a new cold war (or two) with a few proxy conflicts thrown in for good measure. If we take McCain at his word, his administration will be prepared to back up our proxies with direct military intervention if necessary. What's more, McCain has made it clear over the years that he holds an unusually expansive view of what military action entails?namely a willingness to press through to the end and hold out for total victory irrespective of the cost. McCain correctly observes in a November/December 2007 Foreign Affairs article that it should be possible to get the existing nuclear powers to push for revisions aimed at closing some of the loopholes in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and thus greatly enhance American security. Unfortunately, the rest of his agenda pushes in the direction of much more nuclear proliferation. An avowed American policy of undermining Russia's and China's nuclear deterrent would force Russia and China to engage in new nuclear buildups to re-establish it, prompting a cascade of proliferation in India, Pakistan, and possibly beyond, and likely wreck all effort at reviving the multilateral arms-control regime. Meanwhile, the rollback policy will prevent any sort of diplomatic arrangement with potential proliferators like Iran and North Korea. McCain has said that in his opinion, "there's only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran." If he means those words seriously, then a policy that takes meaningful diplomacy off the table will mean war with Tehran? just as McCain's "joke" about The Beach Boys song indicated. If he doesn't, it'll mean Iran moving closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.

10

NUKE NEG – ELECTIONS DDI 2008 – GT DONLAN

2NC A2: Bush Will Strike 1. We’re overstretched – Bush doesn’t have the military or political support to strike now – congressional and military backlash ensure we won’t take military action beyond Iraq. Lame duck status with both Congress and the military will force Bush to stick to domestic issues for the rest of his presidency. 2. GOP internal pressure will deter him from strikes – GOP knows that if they’re in another war, they’d lose more seats in Congress and wouldn’t be able to stop future bills.

11