Question:
Who is this, is it:
(a) Tariq Aziz , foreign minister of Iraq, or
(b) David White who played Larry Tate in "Bewitched".
Trivia: Did you know that actor David White's son was killed in the Pan-Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland?
Posted on 09/03/2002 10:22:21 AM PDT by My Favorite Headache
A question that was just posed to Donald Rumsfeld from one of the pool reporter's there at the Pentagon was "What proof do you have that Saddam is developing or has nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction?"
Rumsfeld-"That case will be made in the next couple of days and weeks for everyone to see"
Now between this comment that he just said and what Tony Blair said this morning....does it appear to all of you that game is on in the coming weeks for real?
A better reason is in post # 100.
I'm pretty sure I heard one of our local conservative talk show hosts here in So.Calif.say that President Bush will be in Louisville,Ky sometime this week! Can anybody confirm? Thanks.
This is true, but it may not be implementable.
One difficulty is that we may be unable to identify the attacker. Or the attacker may not be a country but a small, geographically dispersed group in hiding.
There's another problem that is very difficult to see one's way around -- the frog in boiling water syndrome:
If they slowly ratchet up the scale of their attacks, we may never retaliate. After all, it's already been proven that a small-scale anthrax attack, even in combination with a near-WMD-scale attack (9/11), is insufficient to provoke such a response. If the next anthrax attack kills 50 or 100, surely that's not enough to provoke nuclear retaliation. Then a third attack kills 2,000; of course that's not even as big as 9/11. Then it's 10,000. Will we be able to make the decision to kill millions in response to 10,000? It would seem not. Then, after that, 25,000 doesn't seem that much bigger than what we've already been subjected to. And so on.
Well, you get the idea. We become inured to larger and larger fatality levels; no one attack is so much bigger than its predecessor that it seems to be qualitatively different in such a way as to require total retaliation. And in a decade or two, we've lost.
It's just like the parable of the frog in boiling water.
If it turns out this way, the truth will be that we lost the war when we didn't retaliate for the first anthrax attack.
This is a very depressing scenario. It is why we absolutely must publicly identify last year's sender of anthrax, and, assuming that it was a military action, retaliate appropriately now.
Even that Saddam is not looking to spread the glory of Islam throughout the world, he is more of a self-serving Pan-Arabist. He wants to return the Arabs to their former glory, with he being the newest Saladin. He is not above using the Islamic militants to further his goal; neither are the Islamic militants above using him to further their goal.
There is a basic irrationalness to Saddam's pathology. It equals the same irrationalness that a Bin Laden has. Both Pan-Arabism and Militant Islamic Terrorists are bound up together in reaching their goals.
The Cold War is over... You cannot use it in this context. Nor can you say... hey, the Soviets didn't do it, so Saddam won't do it. Saddam is not the Soviets.
Daschle probably wouldn't let it up for a vote.
What I was replying to was your summing up of the situation as: The Soviets did not use the Hbomb...
In a historical context, the Soviets were rational in the fact that they chose survival over idealogy everytime.
Saddam is not a Islamic Terrorist... so, he does not have the suicidal bent that they have.
Saddam is a self-serving Pan-Arabist who believes that he is the one who will lead the Arabs back to their former glory as a Saladin.
Furthermore, the two means (Islamic militancy and Pan-Arabism) have one end. The destruction of the West.
You cannot disconnect Saddam from the Islamic terrorists no more than you can disconnect Islamic terrorists from Pan-Arabists (even as one as self-serving as Saddam). If there is no survival bent in either means as there was in the Soviet, then you have a dangerous situation on your hand. Saddam may not commit suicide, but he is not above the wholesale destruction of others. The Kurds, the gas used during the Iraq/Iranian war. The firing of Scud missles into Israel, the ecological warfare in the oil fields of Kuwait... He is one of the prime movers in the PLO movement paying for suicide bombers and keeping the pressure on Arafat to continue terrorism against Israel (Arafat isn't being pressured against his will.) The abject brutality of his regime not only among the people, but in his own family.
You cannot use the Soviet behavior as the comparison for expected behavior in Arab politics. To do so is folly and will cost you.
Do you say this because GW will make this a political decision rather than a military one? I ask because I'm hearing alot about how GW can't attack before November because it would be perceived as a gambit to influence the outcome of the election.
I say attack when ready, even if it's November 3rd.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.