Posted on 01/26/2003 3:46:10 AM PST by TheRedSoxWinThePennant
Bush lacks perspective to see risks of war
Sunday, January 26, 2003
Can no one slow down this train speeding toward war in Iraq before it crashes in Baghdad and burns us all?
Hundreds of thousands of protesters throughout the world are trying. So are the alarmed leaders of France and Germany. Turkish officials - caught literally ``between Iraq and a hard place,'' a radio commentator said - are reluctantly OK'ing U.S. use of bases there though 80 percent of Turks told pollsters they fear an attack could bring retaliation against them.
A few hardy voices in our government, including Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, warn of the consequences (though Kerry did vote in October to authorize the use of force).
And some conservatives and libertarians have raised the deadly prospect of a trapped and desperate Saddam Hussein deploying - right here in the USA - some of the chemical weapons of mass destruction that the White House would risk war to make him destroy.
Indeed, this could be the war that we can't just safely watch on TV, seeing the eerie green lights of nighttime bombing raids and the cross-hair scenes of ``smart bombs'' shattering targets below. This time, we might be targets, too.
``Hawks worry that Saddam will use WMD (the chilling initials for nuclear and chemical devices) or give them to terrorists in the future even if we threaten him with devastating retaliation,'' wrote Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, in the latest American Conservative magazine.
If Saddam ``would cut his own throat'' that way - by ignoring the sort of retaliatory threat that stayed his hand on use of chemical warheads during the 1991 Gulf War - ``he will certainly lash out with anything else he has when we go for his jugular . . . Saddam will not go gently if he has nothing left to lose,'' Betts said.
That's what concerns Kennedy. He reminded Herald editors and reporters last week that George Tenet, head of the CIA, has testified ``that if Saddam feels he's really trapped, the likelihood of chemical weapons being used against us increases greatly . . . this thing could quickly spread to the United States, Saddam opening a second front over here.''
Yet even with our homeland security preparations far from secure; (yea wayne why dont you go check out your beloved teddys little INS senate bill from yesterday) even with President Bush's approval rating falling; even though three times as many Americans say the economy is more important to them than Iraq (56 percent to 19 percent in a new CBS poll), the administration's drumbeat for war rolls on.
Kennedy said civilian officials at the Pentagon seem itching for war. And soon. ``This is the optimum time to strike, in terms of military strategy,'' he said, a day after his Senate Armed Services Committee was briefed by the administration.
``The third week in February has a ring to it for them,'' Kennedy said. ``That's a moonless time (just right for night raids) and it's very cool.'' Not the oppressive desert heat of late spring or summer that could sap our soldiers' strength.
Yet even if an attack could be wrapped up as rapidly as Pentagon hawks predict (``They say it'll be an easy walk, over in three or four days,'' said Kennedy, who does not share their view), what comes next could be hugely costly in many ways.
``Invading Iraq would inflame radical Islamists around the world, (OH NO we cant have that they are so peaceful now) acting as a virtual recruiting poster for al-Qaeda,'' wrote Libertarian-minded military scholars Ivan Eland and Bernard Gourley in a new Cato Institute analysis. And what a propaganda field day it would be for Osama bin Laden, who apparently is still alive and working his mischief somewhere.
And Democratic presidential contender Kerry, in his trenchant, thoughtful address at Georgetown University, said:
``We will win. But what matters is not just what we win but what we lose. We need to make certain that we have not unnecessarily twisted so many arms, created so many reluctant partners, abused the trust of Congress or so strained so many relations that the longer-term and more immediately vital war on terror is not made more difficult.''
Well said by a leader who, a voter from New Hampshire noted at a Newsweek focus group, ``has faced the bullets'' in Vietnam.
Kerry has perspective on the consequences of war. My fear is Bush does not. And that, like an earlier president from Texas, he cannot articulate a case for a war that may cost us far more in human life and resources than he might think.
The late author Theodore White wrote that President Lyndon B. Johnson failed on Vietnam policy because he lacked ``a sense of the flow of history, of his own place in it and of the place of Americans in the sweep of time that had brought them to world dominance.''
If that was true of LBJ in 1968, how devastatingly accurate it may be of George W. Bush today.
Wayne Woodlief is a member of the Boston Herald staff.
My goodness, we came this close to blindly stumbling into a fight.
We need to consider what the icons of the Democratic Party are saying, so thoughtfully pointed out to us in this article.
Especially that beacon of military bravery and expertise, Teddy.
And the trenchant and thoughtful John Kerry. Wooo-ooo.
If it weren't for the Boston Globe, we'd be so helpless and foolish.
Nah. Coward.
For the record, this editorial is from the Boston Herald, which is the anti-Globe in Boston.
It's still a panty-waist editorial.
This is the Boston Herald, the Murdoch owned voice against the liberal Globe, just like the NY Post is to the the NY Times.
Anyway, IMHO, this guy is either the lone liberal or a Pat Buchanan brigadier.
Can no one on the Anti-American Socialist Commie Liberal Maggot-Infested Dreadlock Pantywaist Appeasement movement shut them up before they smoke it all?
In the first Persian Gulf War did the Americans take any oil? NO!!!
They are anti-RKBA and Woodlief, there lead political writer is a liberal Rat.
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