Sam Stone,
I guess you didn’t read the OP. My whole point was that Saddams ‘unconditional’ promise to let UN inspectors in had a bunch of conditions.
I agree that Saddam is playing games. The thread has gone off on tangents so I understand if you missed my point.
Slee
Holy cow. I went into some kind of space warp there or something. This whole thread has been about that.
Sorry about that.
I must confess that I’m unaquainted with the author of your cite so I know nothing of his reliability. Assuming that what he writes is accurate, although he is chary with sources, my statement quoted above clearly said that if prompt action wasn’t forthcoming the UN should be pressed to speed things up. I would propose doing that both diplomatically and publicly to get the UN to move. If that doesn’t happen then other solutions might be appropriate. I’m not against action to restrain Hussein. Just against hasty, unilateral action with few, if any, supporters in the rest of the world. If we can enlist the support others we might even get a few good ideas for novel solutions to the problem After all, there are other people in the world who are at least as intelligent as GW.
What you have listed look like the things that Iraq is expected to do, or not do. To me the ultimatum is the “or else” which will be triggered if inspections don’t go to the UN satisfaction. Although it looks like GW wants the US, i.e. GW, to decide what is satisfactory without input from others.
If you want to call the list the “ultimatim” that’s OK by me.
So your contention is that since the inspections stopped, Hussein has had time to develop a nuclear weapon, build up the manufacturing facilities, build the weapons and then empty out the facilities leaving no trace? And all this while operating under a rather strict, although admittedly not airtight, economic sanction. You have demolished a point that I never made and that I dispute is valid in the first place - just a straw man.
Another straw man. I repeat, I’m not disputing the need to solve the Hussein problem. I only object to a unilatel and preemptive strike based on dubious evidence. Even the new British white paper puporting to prove the case against Hussein seems to have as its aim, goading the UN to firm action, and not as a call to immediate arms. It looks to me like Hussein hasn’t yet been given quite enough rope to hang himself. There is no reason why building a coalition against Hussein can’t proceed while the famous war on terrorism goes on. However, even the talk of war with Iraq seems to have taken the edge off the terrorism thing. What will be the result on it of an actual shooting war?
El Jeffe:
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to your reply. A couple of quick reactions:
Actually, on the contrary: many of the same people who ran the country then are running the country now. Cheney, now VP, was Secretary of Defense in 1990-91. Rumsfield was Special Envoy to the Middle East. His current assistant, Paul Wolfowitz (sp?), was issuing policy papers all the way back in 1979. Powell directed Desert Storm together with Schwarzkopf, if I’m not mistaken. The list is undoubtedly longer. (In fact, I wonder how much of the US government is actually elected, compared as a percentage to that part of the government that is bureaucratic/military/appointed, and just sits there year after year?)
In my opinion, all of these men had an agenda then, and they have an agenda now. Basically, I suspect, they want to run a big chunk of the Middle East, if not all of it, for clearly strategic reasons. This is a difficult project to bring to fruition, of course, but they’re doing their best. Launching an attack against Iraq, preferably unilaterally (word of the day!), so as not to be burdened by international/UN interference, would go a long way towards accomplishing that goal. 11 years of sanctions and US/British military incursions has weakened Iraq to the point that it’s easy prey. Now all they have to do is convince the world of the exact opposite: that Iraq is a dangerous, powerful enemy and an imminent threat to US/world security. That’s been a bit of a hard sell, though.
Maybe, but I don’t understand your argument here. Are you claiming that as soon as you commit a crime, you loose all rights, such that the authorities our now justified to treat you in any manner they see fit? Should they have the right to torture you, or cut off your limbs?
To pursue this interesting analogy further: if your parole officer comes over to your house and starts harassing you, looking through your dirty underwear drawer for incriminating evidence against you, and so on, do you feel that his actions are justified – even if, technically speaking, they are against the law?
When the US government violates UN Charter agreements in the way Iraq has – such as its invasion of Panama – do you feel that it should suffer under the same constraints?
DCU:
No, but it would be hypocritical to supply the Soviets with military and financial aid after the war, while carefully ignoring/denying their violations of human rights (see the citation in Squink’s post, above, for an example in the case of Iraq), as long as the Soviets supported US business/strategic interests; and then turn around and start bombing them when they balked us, under the guise that the US government was terribly concerned about their human rights record.
It was also hypocritical of the US government to consistently and loudly denounce USSR/ communist human rights violations, while denying, rationalizing, excusing, or otherwise ignoring the violations of strategic allies, and in fact providing them with the military and economic means to execute such violations.
Clearly, during WWII, an emergency situation required that the US also make it with some uncomfortable bed-fellows; but how do you see that as analogous to the government’s support (and militarization) of Iraq, followed by its U-turn after the Gulf Conflict?
Nerotik:
How were them ribs?
I’m sorry but these conditions seem extraordinary reasonnable to me. No compromision of the Iraki sovereignity and security seems obvious to me. It shouldn’t even be necessary to say so. Same with the presidential palace. How would you feel about foreign weapon inspectors searching the White House?
There are basics, obvious limits that should be respected in such an operation. And the conditions you pointed at seem to belong to this category.
If the intents are to compromise the sovereignity and security of Iraq, we aren’t talking any more about weapon inspections.
The problem I have is not whether or not the conditions they’re putting on the inspections are reasonable or not (though personally I don’t believe they are). It’s that Hussein promised ‘unconditional’ access. As soon as he starts adding conditions to the access it stops to be ‘unconditional’, no matter how reasonable those conditions are.
So you’re willing to start a war over semantics ? In its purest sense, the term ‘unconditional’ implies the right to regularly probe Saddam’s nether regions for toxic coliforms. If we include such ‘unreasonable’ things in our definition of ‘unconditional’ we’ll quickly find that there is no alternative to invasion.
David Simmons:
Okay, honest question: How long would you propose the US wait, if the inspections take as long to begin as I believe they will, until we are “allowed” to act “unilaterally”? (Oooh, I got to use the word of the day, too! :))
David Simmons:
Sorry if you missed the “ultimatum” bit in that post. Since anything said by a politician must necessarily be translated from English into Politician-ese, it’s not hard to miss the point of Bush’s speech. Basically, Saddam does what I listed, or:
Which to me sounds like, “We’ll kick the tar out of you and send you packing.” Or, to put it more bluntly, “We will invade.”
David Simmons:
Sorry if I was confusing. The point I was trying to make is that even if weapons inspectors could deduce that there was probably a bomb here at one point, and there wasn’t anymore, that information may not be of much use. First off, if they’re not 100% sure, their actions are much more limited. We could bomb it, but that would do us little good, anyway, since the bombs and equipment are no longer there. Since it’s not definite that anything was there, we can’t say, “A-ha, Saddam, you cheated, now we’re going to invade,” and have any more credibility than we do now. I contend that unless inspectors actually trip over a functional bomb plant, inspections will do little good, as Saddam may still have a strong degree of plausible deniability.
To sum it up, you said, in paraphrase, “I’m sure that inspectors could tell if they find a place where bombs used to be”, and I responded with, “But can they be 100% sure, and even if they are, without any actual bombs or equipment, what does this information do for us?”
I don’t see it as setting up a strawman, but it’s possible I was misinterpreting your statement. If so, please correct me.
David Simmons:
Umm… no. What you said before was:
Sorry if I misunderstood, but it seemed clear to me that you were saying that Bush was only going after Iraq because he wasn’t doing well against al Qaeda. The implication here, to me, was that he was switching tasks, which wasn’t justified until we had decisively won the War On Terrorism. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. However, I see two possible scenarios here, regarding the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda:
There is no connection. Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. If this the case, then your comment was completely pointless, and on par with saying “the War on Drugs isn’t going well, so we shouldn’t invade Iraq,” or “we haven’t cured cancer, so we can’t really do anything about Iraq.” The one has nothing to do with the other.
There IS a connection. Iraq sponsors terrorism. In this case, clearing out the bad government in Iraq will make the rest of the war easier, in that al Qaeda has one less place to hide - or at least one less place where they know they can kick back and rest safely.
Either way, I think your comment was off-base.
Jeff
I agree with you that saying, “These demands are unreasonable, but we should have the right to make them, anyway” is a little… odd. Personally, though, I don’t think they ARE unreasonable. We want to be able to search his palaces. We want to be able to search his mosques. That’s because we have strong reason to believe he may try to hide weapons in his palaces and mosques. Now, if we said, “Bend over, Saddam, we’re going to perform a cavity search to make sure you’re not stashing a suitcase nuke in your bum,” I can see room for complaint. However, I agree that Saddam’s objection to the way we would like to see inspections performed counts as “applying conditions”.
Jeff
Well, last things first. I’m not sure that when unilateral action in a preemptive strike is justified is within my mental power to determine. I would just say that GW started talking about preemptive strikes out of the blue and quite some time ago. Like at his speech at West Point. I’ll have to leave the exact timing of when enough is enough up to those have better data than I have been given.
This is a misstatement of what I said. Making atom bombs requires an extensive manufacturing establishment and there has not been time to build that up, build bombs and then tear down the capability. Your paraphrase of “find a place where bombs used to be” is totally wrong and not even close to what I said. So you are still arguing with a creature of you own making, a straw man.
You didn’t misunderstand. Motives tricky but in my opinion, GW doesn’t like to stick to dirty, messy and detail work. That is what the war on terrorism will be. On the other hand, a shooting war with armies, at least with these two armies, can be short and decided quickly. But after that, the messy, detailed cleaning up begins and I haven’t seen GW say anything about that. Nor have I heard much of anything from GW about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. For that you need Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and Yemen, and Indonesia, and The Philippines and on and on.
I extend the distrust that most people have about politicians to GW - doubled and redoubled and in spades.
It may not matter whether Saddam stipulates conditions or not.
The Beeb claims that Colin Powell pretty much told them that Saddam is toast whether he lets the inspectors in or not. Read it for yourself–is that what he’s saying? Sounds kinda like it to me, too.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2279758.stm
The complete interview is here.
Point taken. I concede that it is, in a way, hypocritical. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, though. Before, we pereceived Iran as a greater threat than Iraq. We felt that we, and the world, had a vested interest in Iran losing the skirmish (whether or not we were correct is irrelevant - we FELT we were correct). Now, we pereceive Iraq as a significant threat. We should remove him.
Imagine that your town has a crime problem, and there’s a shortage of cops. People are dying in the streets because of gang violence. You have a few extra potential cops lying on the sidelines, but these guys are trouble. Theyhave a history for beating up thugs rather than arresting them, and some of them may be dirty. However, you think there’s more of an immediate problem with the gangs, so you stick them on the squad. The gang problem is eventually cleaned up, but now you have these dirty cops to worry about. Some of them have formed crime rings. Now you need to take care of them. Hey, maybe putting them on the squad was a bad idea. You cleaned up the gangs, but at what cost? Nevertheless, you can’t just sit around and watch these cops go around breaking the law, you need to do something. This is what we’re doing with Iraq. We created a monster, and maybe it was warranted or maybe not, but we should deal with it now.
I dunno, to me the argument that we created the Saddam problem should give us extra reason to go take him out. We’re cleaning up our own mess.
Perhaps my eariler example was poorly phrased. I think that the criminal has some basic rights, but when decides to be a criminal, he does, in fact, surrender most of his rights. He loses much of his liberty. The parole officers will give him conditions, and if he wishes to remain free, he must abide by those conditions. The criminal knows in advance pretty much the whole story. He knows if he’s caught, he’ll be jailed. He knows if he wants parole, he’ll have to deal with a lot of crap. But no, that doesn’t give his parole officer the right to dig through his underwear drawer if that right wasn’t agreed to during the parole arrangements.
With Saddam, he knew that attacking Kuwait would piss off a lot of people. He knew it was possible he would be attacked himself. For whatever reason, he invaded anyway. We pounded his sandy butt back to Iraq, and then agreed to stop beating him down if signed the cease-fire, which had a number of conditions attached to it. Before we all signed that cease-fire, we had the right to demand pretty much what we wanted (within some reason, of course), or the right to say to hell with it and just continue attacking. We decided to grant Saddam parole, so to speak. And now he’s violated the terms of that parole, and repeatedly. If he were a criminal, he’d be back in prison. As it stands, though, since he’s not abiding by the terms of his agreement, this grants us two opportunities, both of them morally justified, IMHO: One, we can attack him again (which is my preference). He broke the cease-fire agreement, so why should we still be ceasing fire? Two, we can craft a new agreement, again subject to our whims, that he can take or leave. He certainly has the freedom to turn it down. And we have the freedom to hand his ass to him on a silver platter.
Hopefully that makes more sense than my previous poorly-crafted analogy.
Jeff
He could be saying that, or he could not. It’s difficult to tell with official press releases like that. Powell certainly can’t give an official ruling in such a manner.
If I had to guess, I would say that Powell is just trying to not rule out anything. There’s still a chance that Saddam could convince us not to invade, but at this point it’ll probably take more than weapons inspections, even unconditional ones. Since we know Saddam has at least some WMDs, as long as he says, “No, we don’t”, we’re not getting anywhere, as it just shows that he believes he can hide them from us. I think if Saddam said, “Okay, you got me, here’s my stash, let’s talk this over,” it would stay our hand, but short of that, we’re going to war.
Jeff