Piffle. No such thing. American forces will beat on Saddam like a red-headed stepchild. He doesn’t even have the power he had the last time he got his butt kicked!
You then indulge youself in geopolitical clarovoyance, a much admired trait in certian circles. Despite an underwhelming absence of evidence, you conjure the threat of a nuclear armed Saddam. Which is, of course, supposition. Perhaps a foreign policy that recognizes supposition and intuition as sufficient grounds for war would be more to your liking. I beg to differ. In fact, I insist.
I further insist that a sacrifice of innocent civlians on the presumption that such a sacrifice will preserve the innocent lives of others in some distant future is a judgement properly reserved for God. (That Position may not be occupied, but your nomination has escaped my notice.)
Temporary members of the Security Council. Currently on record as favoring the French-German position. They will change thier minds. As I’ve noted before, GeeDubyas announced intention of going to war anyway poisons any possible debate: why oppose the biggest kid on the planet when it won’t do any good and will only piss him off? Rest easy, you will have your war. I haven’t the slightest doubt.
Shodan
No doubt. Is it “OK” for Saddam to have missiles? I’d prefer he wouldn’t have access to a rusty .22 automatic. Will I send my children or yours into harm’s way to prevent it? No way.
All this Bushwa about nukes has come down to nada. There isnt the slightest evidence that Saddam is within a million miles of having nukes. Even if he had, for chrissakes, we’ve got thousands upon thousands of thermonuclear bombs, and the means to deliver them toot sweet. He doesnt even have kilotons, we’ve got megatons!
Keep in mind…we have absolute military superiority. Even if we grant Saddam every weapon in our most paranoid fantasm, he cannot defeat us. He can hurt us, but thats all. Without the means for strategic victory, any tactical advantage is nothing more than suicide. And if Saddam is such a suicidal maniac, how come he’s been sitting on his hands while American and British airplanes bitch-slap him with impunity?
Supposition? We have the testimony of Iraqi defectors about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. We have the evidence of the invasion of Kuwait on Saddam’s territorial ambitions. Wake up.
It’s 1935 and you’re insisting that Germany should be left to rearm.
It’s September 10, 2001, and you are denouncing enforcement of airline security regualtions.
Should we wait until lower Manhattan is radioactive rubble before you say, “Ooops, maybe we should have been more vigilant”?
Defectors? You’re not kidding, are you? Since when are defectors considered reliable sources of intelligence? And if they were reliable sources of intelligence, wouldn’t that info have been passed to the inspectors in charge of such? Then they would have found something, wouldn’t they. But they didn’t.
The rest of your post once again boasts your clarovoyance, how clearly you see the future which escapes my dim comprehension.
Lets test it. What am I thinking about you, right now?
"THE highest-ranking defector ever to turn informant on Saddam Hussein’s government told United Nations weapons inspectors in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks after the Gulf war.
But UN inspectors hushed up that part of Hussein Kamel’s story - which he also told to debriefers from British and United States intelligence - because they wanted to keep the pressure on Iraq to tell more.
The revelation, reported in the US magazine Newsweek, raises new questions over claims by the US and Britain that Iraq has failed to account for vast stores of chemical and biological weapons. "
Excuse me, you were saying? About the reliable intelligence from defectors? Pray continue…
Go ahead and make it personal, I don’t care. That’s your problem.
[quote]
Since when are defectors considered reliable sources of intelligence? And if they were reliable sources of intelligence, wouldn’t that info have been passed to the inspectors in charge of such?
[quote]
Defectors are useful for learning the inner woprkings of dicatorships, a form of government less transparent than you might think. While I’m not au courant on Iraqi defectors, North Korean defectors have been invaluable in revealing secrets, as in Hwang Jang-Yop, the highest ranking official to leave that prison. And yes, I speak and read fluent Korean. (I lived in Seoul from 1993-1999). I have to believe that Iraqi defectors are at least as reliable as North Korean defectors.
You misunderstand a bit, Gobear. I do indeed intend a shade of mockery, but only a shade. If your assumptions are correct, yes, your conclusion is correct: it might well be moral to sacrifice some to save many.
But it is that assumption itself that is the flaw, and the danger. History is strewn with innocent corpses precisely because of such assumptions. Not in every case, but in many. Beyond the assumption, there is the presumption, that we regard ourselves as wise and knowing enough to make such a judgement. We are not gods, we are men, flawed, weak, and biased. What possible mathematics, what actuarial tables can you bring to such an argument? How many dead Iraqi children will preserve the lives of how many Saudi and Israeli children? We both know you cannot truly answer such a question, and, for the same reason, you should not pose it. It is not reasonable, it is not sane: it is the mathematics of slaughter, the calculus of carnage, and it is unholy in the truest sense of the word: to offer our reason to the service of madness.
Perhaps death now will preclude death later. But death now is the present question, it is not theoretical, it is fact. None of us could point a pistol at an Iraqi child and calmly explain to her that we kill to prevent death, we have made the calculation, and it is a reasonable choice. I could not pull that trigger, I sincerely doubt that you could either. I will not ask another to do it in my name, at my behest. If it were within my power to forbid it, I would do so without a moments hesitation.
The same one that warranted having a military in the first place. The factors you mention, deaths, are involved in all war, period, whether or not you find it justified. What do you think about justified war?
That is clearly the way you’ve chosen to look at it. Why, I don’t know, it only seems to cloud an already cloudy issue.
Nor could I explain such a thing to an Iraqi soldier, even if he did speak English. So?
So now we go from a war you find unjustified to explicit and intentional baby-killing? WTF man?
Rather than being “to the point” this argument is the exact opposite of the point. A violation is a violation whether it be 1 mile or 1000 miles. At some point, a line must be drawn, a line that is clear and unarguable.
Your assessment of the situation is that “close” is good enough, but when does something cease to be close? Is 100 miles OK? How about 120? 140? 200? 300? 1000? One of these numbers must strike you as being a clear violation, but it is just your opinion of close, and others will have differing opinions. If this were the rule, then the US would say “3 miles is OK” and France would say “10 miles is OK” and Iraq would say “50 miles is OK” and they would all be right, sort of.
It is much easier, and more fair, to draw that clear line, because nobody’s opinion matters anymore, just the facts. That line has been drawn at X miles. If the fact is that these missles go >X miles, then they must be destroyed, my opinion of Saddam is irrelevant. If they could only go <X miles, then they are acceptable, again my opinion is not needed.
The last thing that we really need in this process is the entire UN trying to decide whether or not a violation occured based on “close enough”.
Beagle Jeez, you’re right! I completely forgot about the intercontinental nuclear anthrax drones! And Our Fearless Leader specifically warned us about them! And Colin Powell even had a picture of something flying with something that could be being sprayed out which maybe could be like, anthrax, or something. Well, shit, that settles it! Nuke 'em till they glow!
erislover Any argument can be reduced, and in some instances inflated, to an absurdity. What do I think about a justified war? I think its extremely rare. War against Japan, for instance, qualifies because of an actual military attack on our country. I do not accept the notion that hypothetical situations, based on conjectures no more reliable than scrying with entrails, meets that standard. Until you can reliably demonstrate that you know exactly what Saddam bin Laden will do tomorrow, I will continue to find it unlikely that you know what he will do six months from now. As a basis for launching an attack when the deaths of unknown numbers of innocent civilians is a given, it is worse than an absurdity, it is an obscenity.
Cheesesteak “The last thing that we really need in this process is the entire UN trying to decide whether or not a violation occured based on “close enough”.”
Exactly wrong! That is precisely what is needed! We need an utterly effete and ineffectual debating society that will drag this out until all the asinine drama drains away. With any luck, the process can be dragged out long enough until everyone involved dies of old age. As far as yours truly is concerned, that is an utterly splendid solution!
Thr trouble with your hard-nosed, realistic Leaders of Men is thier unfortunate tendency to gets lots of other people killed.
That would be Saddam. Your fantasy about an American soldier shooting an Iraqi child in the head at point blank range speaks volumes about your distorted view of warfare.
It’s not that Saddam has killer drones, biological weapons, access to billions of petrodollars, control over a nation-state, the motive, means, and opportunity to strike at the US. It’s all that and so much more that make him dangerous. Globe spanning drones are not that high tech any more, luc. Wut’ wit’ GPS n’all.
To tell you the truth, it is simply too easy to kill millions of people with, especially, germ weapons. Aerosol cans and some motivated killers are about all it takes. The Soviets made enough biological stuff to kill the world several times over. I’m afraid that the genie is out of the bottle. It’s not that Saddam doesn’t have the ability to kill us, it’s that all the other crazy dictators will have similar or worse capability in a few years.
That would be Saddam until it is us. Then it is us. My view of warfare is “distorted”? Have I overemphasized the negative, perhaps I have characterized it as savage and cruel? Have I misunderstood? Perhaps you might prefer such euphemisms as “vigorous” and “stern”. Is it likely that a man finish burying his child and then rush off to strew roses in the path of the American army? I think not.
Beagle
Oh, so this time its the truth? We can have total faith in this instance, marching in a legion of lies and half-truths, here is this genuine morsel of utter veracity. Your blind faith might be charming were it focused on persons more worthy. As I’ve said, I am admittedly reluctant to be led to war, but I’m damned if I’ll be bullshitted into it!
You are expanding the debate beyond its limitations. If you wish to debate whether or not the US should dedicate its existence to flushing out and annihilating all the evil dictators of the world, by all means let’s discuss the possibilities. But to pretend that our policy is a moral crusade against evil dictators buggers the question.
This is the crux of it, isn’t it Beagle?
What everybody is afraid of; Nowadays and even more so in the future, those that want to hurt us, can.
The US’s safety barrier of megatons of nuclear weapons and a powerful conventional army can’t effectively protect you from this threat.
Do you think you can solve that threat by just barging into any country, you feel could eventually pose such a threat?
Is that your motivation for attacking Iraq?
Surely, you can see that this is impossible.
By the time you are down to your 3rd or 4th dictator, it won’t be just dictators you will have to worry about but other countries as well.
Hell, even now other countries are getting very worried about the US.
Are you planning to conquer the entire world?
Besides, even occupying a country is no safeguard, because, as you say, an aerosol can is all it takes.
I can offer nothing to reduce your fears, I don’t know if there is a solution. All I can say is that wildly lashing out at anything that moves is not a very effective solution.
So may I then return the question to you? How can you stand this calculus of death?
That is truly a shame, because while I have no idea what you ate for breakfast this morning, or indeed if you ate at all, I can assert with almost 100% confidence that you will eat breakfast within the next six months that contains a grain product.
That, however, is a chance I can live with.
It is standard. Why do you think a retaliatory strike is justified? YOU don’t know how many people the Japanese were going to kill!
Really, I have no reason to doubt you feel this things, but I am at a loss to understand them.
elucidator, can I take your response to mean that you don’t really care if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? You don’t seem to care if they break the rules that the UN set for them, you just want to use those rules to delay action.
I suppose if Blix found a 20 Megaton bomb, you’d say that military action is unnecessary since we found and destroyed the weapon, right?
From tonight’s news it sounds like Saddam is going to go along with the weapons inspectors’ demands for the destruction of the missiles and that the process will start in the morning under UN supervision. Saddam is playing this nicely. He will do just enough to avoid running afoul of the letter of the UN demands while playing to world opinion as being bullied by the US and reserving as much capability as possible.
On the world opinion thing, it doesn’t help that our government appears to be changing its ground for the justification. Now we have what one columnist has called the pretext de jour. We started off saying that we had to go after Saddam to make him disarm and that was the objective. Then we started saying that regime change was the idea. Lately we have been saying that we are out to bring democracy to the Middle East–whether the Middle East wants it or not. Whatever is going on, we are starting to look a little more than inept and Saddam is showing himself to be the slick operator and skilled manipulator that he has always been. It might help if some government officials made a more concerted effort to keep their mouths shut and let the Secretary of State and his people do the talking.
Huh? What? This analogy is stunningly vacuous. Of course you realize I’m talking about predicting what Saddam will or will not do on a international and/or geopolitical framework. Lets just stick to that, OK, and leave the Cheerios out of it.
I have turned this statement around in my mind, several times, examining it from front to rear, bounced it on the floor. I confess. I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Actually, elucidator, I think Saddam is sufficiently different from all the other dictators in the world to warrant our attention. I know that we could help alleviate our problem with Usama - bases in Saudi - if we could get rid of the threat in Iraq. Saddam is exceptionally bad, even in a world of bad dictators.
However, I’m not enthustiastic about any Iraqi war for my own reasons, as you know. It looks like Saddam is going to create a Fortress Baghdad and defend it with chemical and biological weapons. If we can protect his people from him, then it might be worth a shot.