Posted on 08/28/2002 1:17:12 PM PDT by aculeus
Saddam is not crazy to want them. That's the reason he must go.
The growing debate on invading Iraq hinges on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Opponents of invasion discount the existing threat by arguing that A) he is not crazy enough to use them against us, and B) if he doesn't use them, what threat are they?
The response to A is we do not know that Saddam is sane enough never to use them against us, and it is not a proposition that we should wish to test by giving him yet more time to acquire them. Saddam has acted with supreme irrationality in the past, from launching a catastrophic war against Iran in 1980 to forfeiting half a dozen opportunities offered to him in 1990 to extricate himself with advantage from Kuwait. In the annals of tyranny and on the scale of capricious savagery, he ranks somewhere between Caligula and Mao. There's not much percentage in counting on the rationality of such gentlemen.
Which brings us to objection B: What use are weapons of mass destruction anyway? Well, we had a quite extraordinary demonstration of their efficacy this summer. Just a few weeks ago, India and Pakistan appeared on the verge of war. It never happened. Not only did the feared war not go nuclear, but it did not even go conventional. Why? Many reasons, but perhaps the most important was, paradoxically, the nukes themselves. India made clear that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. Pakistan, however, did not follow suit. "We ... do not subscribe to a no-first-use doctrine," declared Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S.
Why? Simply put, because Pakistan is the weaker party. And the weaker party, if nuclear capable, invariably holds out the threat of nuclear war as a way to deter conventional attack.
Pakistan was saying to India, You have a much stronger army. You could probably launch a war and overrun not just Kashmir but much of Pakistan as well. That is why we built our nuclear arsenal. Of course, we do not want to use it. But if you overrun us, we just might strike first. Think about it.
India did. The iron law of the nuclear age is this: nuclear weapons are instruments of madness; their actual use would be a descent into madness, but the threat to use them is not madness. On the contrary, it is exceedingly logical.
During the cold war, the U.S. also threatened first use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets fielded a huge conventional army that could have overrun Western Europe. The U.S. response was not to match the Soviets with countless tank divisions but to threaten nuclear retaliation against a conventional attack.
This is known as the doctrine of extended deterrence. It is "extended" because it was not American nukes deterring Soviet nukes in protection of the American homeland; it was American nukes extended in their deterrence to provide an umbrella for Europe against nonnuclear attack.
At home, first use provoked protest from the pacifist left, most dramatically against President Reagan, who was portrayed as a nuclear cowboy. This was silly. The doctrine of first use made perfect sense. It kept the peace. It also demonstrated the peculiar utility of otherwise unusable nuclear weapons: to deter a conventional attack.
That is precisely why today we cannot allow bad guys like Saddam to get their hands on nukes: not merely because a crazed Saddam might actually use them on us but also because a rational Saddam, one not interested in committing suicide by attacking us out of the blue with nukes, could nonetheless use them as accessories to aggression.
How? Imagine that Israel had not destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. What would have happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait? With a nuclear arsenal at Saddam's disposal, would the U.S. have attacked? As it was, war against a nonnuclear Iraq was authorized by the U.S. Senate by a mere five votes. Had Saddam had nukes in 1991, he would probably today be king of all Arabia.
We are in a race against time. Were Iraq to acquire a deliverable nuclear weapon, it would gain a measure of invulnerability. This is not because its nuclear arsenal could ever match America's but because the threat of just a few nuclear weapons, delivered by missile or terrorist to, say, New York City or San Francisco, would allow an aggressor to commit whatever depredations he fancied, calculating that America would be deterred from intervening with its otherwise overwhelming conventional power.
Nukes are not weapons of insanity. They have a logic. The U.S. showed it during the cold war. Pakistan showed it this year. Saddam would like to show it tomorrow. Which is why time is short. Nukes do not have to explode to be useful. Their value lies in mere possession. Possession creates an umbrella of inviolability. And there is nothing more dangerous than an inviolable aggressor.
If a man spends $5,000 on a steel front door with 10 locks but leaves his back door open every night, he's a bigger fool than the man who doesn't lock any of his doors.
Yes, yes!
I'd bet that if we dropped leaflets on the fine citizens of Iraq promising say $5 billion to be shared by all of the citizens of the town that popped Saddam and his kids, he'd be in gun sights all over his country.
No place to hide, no army to support his reign of terror, no guards to save his sorry arse.
$5 Billion = about five days of a war.
In which way does this observation of yours make the argument "fall apart"?
Policemen regularly abduct adult citizens and place them into little cells with bars on the windows. Does that mean that they are in no position whatsoever, and/or have no right to, decide whether some Joe Schmoe is sane enough/has the right to abduct (say) a little girl and treat her in like manner?
Get real. Moral equivalency between Saddam and the US may wow 'em in the faculty lounge, but come on.
Your argument doesn't fly at all. It's irrelevant. Whatever had happened in American past, it doesn't mean Saddam has to be given a chance to obtain nukes.
By your logic, any shithead now is entitled to develop and use nukes because America once did. Wake up!
Alberta...you have a pesky habit of being close to being right.
Well, I have no particular affinity for either the Kuwaitis or (especially) the Saudis, but the first statement is simply wrong (though it is funny).
In thinking this one through, one would wonder where the world would be today if we had let Hussein keep Kuwait and the take over Saudi Arabia. He'd have had the oil revenue and resources of 3 big oil producers; he could have easily cut all Saudi production and still had Iraq's and Kuwait's flowing. His revenues would have been enormously higher, first because of the added Kuwaiti production, and second because the removal of the Saudi production would've caused the price of oil to leap substantially higher. Now, with all of that extra revenue what would Saddam have done, stay in his palaces counting all of his gold? I don't think so. I think that the European whores that are falling all over themselves to sell Iraq sensitive equipment while Iraq suffers from diminished revenues and sanctions would have been selling him anything he wanted. He'd have lots of nukes by now, as well as delivery systems capable of hitting Europe. His armed forces would be immeasurably larger and stronger than in 1991, and Iran would probably have fallen to the new Babylonian Empire. This meglomaniac wouldn't have sat still - he'd have grabbed for the brass ring of his part of the world - Arab/Moslem unification. If he'd gotten that, we'd really be up the creek. Who knows, perhaps 9/11 would've seen a nuke destroy NY and DC, not "just" a few aircraft murdering 3,000+ people.
No, gentlemen, we were right to stop Hussein then. The trouble is that we didn't finish him off. If we don't do it soon, then we will have to contend with a nuclear-armed Saddam. I would bet that Israel will nuke Iraq before they see him with nukes, because they'd have to know that Israel would cease to exist soon afterward. Any way you look at it, there's a war coming. We have a choice - on our terms or theirs. I choose ours. We chose "theirs" in World War II and freedom was nearly snuffed out - in the nuclear age this is not a mistake that we can afford to make again.
Bump for your brevity.
Saudi Arabia is key to stability in the Middle East, and the free flow of oil at market prices. Saddam is too much of a wild card to allow him free reign.
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