The Iraq Follies

President Bush seems to be hinting that he hopes someone will shoot Saddam Hussein or that Saddam will decide to retire. All things are possible, but Saddam isn't the retiring type, and he certainly did not reach age 65 in his job by being an easy target.

More than a decade ago, I wrote that the first George Bush had inadvertently provided Saddam with guaranteed protection against a coup. By making war on the Iraqi people and by so obviously being in the pocket of the Israelis, the United States assured that any Iraqi who tried to replace Saddam would be immediately branded an American-Zionist agent and ripped apart by the Iraqi people. Iraqis, who don't like Saddam, dislike the United States and Israeli governments even more.

If there is no chance of a replacement surviving in the top spot, there is no point in taking the enormous risk of trying to assassinate a man who is an expert in survival. Our current President Bush has continued the "protection" policy. Only a senior leader would have even a slim chance of getting close enough to Saddam to whack him, and our esteemed president has let it go public that Iraqi senior leaders will be tried as war criminals. All that piece of stupidity does is guarantee that the senior leadership will remain loyal to Saddam.

So it looks increasingly as if the president is going to have to go to war if he wants to eliminate Saddam Hussein. It looks as if he will have to go to war in the face of a United Nations inspections report that says no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction can be found. That probably won't deter Bush, but it will create enormous and profound problems for the United States. We will be viewed by most of the world as a bully and a hypocrite of the first order.

It's clear by now that Bush isn't going to make public any evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction because he doesn't have any. He claims to have provided the inspectors with the U.S. intelligence, but if so, having acted on it, they haven't found anything.

In the meantime, he might blunder us into a war with North Korea. While we can probably take Iraq with relatively few American casualties, there is no way under the sun to fight a Korean War II without very large American casualties. In the first place, within hours of the start of the war, the 37,000 Americans sitting there as a tripwire will be dead. I doubt the North Koreans will bother to take any prisoners this time. Already the neoconservatives are trying to downplay Korean strength by harping on how poor the country is. Well, they should remember their own rhetoric. North Korea is often described as the last Stalinist dictatorship on earth. So it is. Yet when Stalin was alive, the majority of the Soviet people were also poor, often starving, and he nevertheless produced an enormous military machine. Stalin had hundreds of divisions that German intelligence didn't know existed, and the Soviet Union turned out T-34 tanks by the tens of thousands. Never confuse general prosperity or the lack of it with military strength. Like a poor man with a .357-caliber Magnum, a country can be poor but well-armed, too.

America's relationship with Israel is behind this problem. North Korea, even with nuclear weapons, is no threat to the United States. The Israelis, however, are deathly afraid that North Korea will sell nuclear warheads and long-range missiles to Iran or other Israeli enemies. Don't take my word for it. Watch your cable news shows. The same pro-Israel, pro-war-with-Iraq crowd has already started yakking about how dangerous it would be if North Korea were allowed to export its weapons. Dangerous to whom? Well, they never say, but they obviously mean Israel, since the Israelis themselves have often voiced this fear in Israeli newspapers. Their "axis of evil" and our "axis of evil" are the same.

It's too bad the early Zionists didn't pick Kenya for their new colony instead of Palestine. The United States would have had a much easier time of it. Hopefully, though, one day Americans will get tired of pulling Israel's chestnuts out of the fires of its own making. Eliminating threats by making peace with its neighbors seems to be a low priority in Israel.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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2 posted on 01/15/2003 4:25:42 PM PST by Support Free Republic (Your support keeps Free Republic going strong!)

"By making war on the Iraqi people and by so obviously being in the pocket of the Israelis,....."

I only read this far into the article. Then I saw that it was written by some left-wing stringer, not a real journalist.....

Then I saw that it was written by some left-wing stringer, not a real journalist.....

Reese a left-wing stringer? LOL. He's been a syndicated columnist for years and is hardly left-wing.

The Dem's are frightened by the prospect of war with Iraq. What scares the pants off of them is that the war will be short, decisive with little loss of American lives.

GWB's popularity will soar even higher and the Dem's will get creamed in 2004.

It's scary...for Dem's.

My one glimmer of cynicism is that this thing is being put off until the maximum effect can be obtained for the benefit of the 04 election. I hope that is not the case. And I hope that much more is being done below the radar that makes all this show simply that, a show- to cover the real action. I know we have spec forces in Iraq and the Turks are in the north. Maybe we are engaging in a giant squeeze play that will not be apparent until we wake up to see that Baghdad is cut off and no longer connected to the countryside.

It looks as if he will have to go to war in the face of a United Nations inspections report that says no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction can be found. That probably won't deter Bush, but it will create enormous and profound problems for the United States. We will be viewed by most of the world as a bully and a hypocrite of the first order.

LIBERAL BALONEY!
White House promises 'smoking gun intelligence'

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