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Re: let's not do the military thing


I second that motion.  After talking to Laura this evening, I'm pretty 
convinced that a military topic would be

1) Overkill
2) Problematic for Negative Ground
3) Come On! It's not as important to that region as are other issues

While I think that a military topic might provide decent limits, it 
becomes problematic for reasons that Laura mentioned.  That is to say 
that I thnk that it might be a good idea to have some sort of limit as to 
"what" exactly is being done, but I'd prefer it not to be 
security/military type stuff.  I think that even just generic "change 
foriegn policy" might be better off for negatives than a military topic 
is.  Here are my suggestions for categories of action:

1 - Development Assistance - Pull out the backfiles... Just kidding!  
Some may see this as redundant with the NDT South Asia topic a few years 
back, but lets not kid ourselves: it was more than a few years back - 
none of the seniors debating next year debated on that topic.  I was 
still debating in high school, as were most of us who happen to have 
eligibility left.  Also, different countries -- those dated backfiles 
will be only of minimal use.  Development assistance provides us with a 
fresh option for debate that's bound to be fruitful.

2 - Aid Policy - Probably includes Development assistance, but other
sub-categories as well, such as EDUCATION, conditioned aid, aid to
governments, aid to NGOs within SE Asian nations, aid in kind (as opposed
to $$$), aid for democracy and human rights (political development). 

3 - 1 and parts of 2 combined: a resolution focusing on Aid and development 
assistance.  Wording might be a bit redundant.  I'd think we could limit 
it to particular types of aid as well as all of dev. assistance and get 
decent balance of ground.  Right now this is my preferred choice.

4 - Trade Policy - Already been discussed by others.

5 - Human Rights Policy - Includes a variety of things.  I believe that 
this is well discussed in the topic paper, so I'm not going to take it on.

6 - Diplomatic Policy - Could be interesting in terms of Nations like 
Indonesia and the Phillipenes, but might bee to sparse in terms of other 
nations.

7 - Policy to foster cooperation between topic nations.

8 - Tourist policy - may sound a bit imperialist - turn the nations into 
tourist traps, but it might certainly figure into US policy??

Ultimately, I think our best bet is development assistance and one or two 
other specific types of Aid.

In other news: my preference is to limit the resolution to ASEAN 
Nations.  It keeps the topic manageable without a huge list of nations 
that make the resolution longer than this e-mail message.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My suggested resolution follows [the words in brackets are possbile 
substitutions and/or insertions]:

Resolved: The United States [Federal] Government should substantially 
increase foreign aid to [or "toward"] one or more ASEAN member nations in 
any [or "one or more"] of following areas: development assistance, 
poltical development aid ["democracy promotion"], education.

my preferred version of the above resolution is:

Resolved: The United States Government should substantially increase 
foreign aid to one or more ASEAN member nations in any of the following 
areas: development assistance, democracy promotion, education.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sean Upton
Utah Debate
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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