Although I was always a supporter of the armed liberation of Iraq primarily on the grounds that overthrowing a tyranny is justification in and of itself, I have always been highly sceptical of the ostensible reasons quoted by the US and UK governments.
Nevertheless, I still supported the actions even if the reasons were suspect. Although sometimes a war may amount to the lesser evil smashing the greater evil, that is not reasonable grounds for opposing the overthrow of the greater evil… for example I was quite happy to support the ghastly communist Vietnamese regime’s invasion of Cambodia and their overthrow of the utterly demonic Khmer Rouge regime, so supporting a US/UK ouster of Ba’athist Socialism is a no-brainer.
I am probable-to-puzzled on the WMD issue: I suspect they do indeed exist but I suppose only time will tell. But on the much trumpeted Iraqi secular Ba’athism – Islamic fundamentalist Al Qaeda link however, I have been scornfully dismissive.
It would seem I was quite wrong. It looks like the Saddam Hussain – Osama bin Laden link was indeed true!
I’m not soo surprised. If two organisations hate America as much as they clearly did, then they will at least talk to one another. Of course, if they had succeeded in actually defeating America, they then would have been at each others throats before too long. I can’t help but think of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle here, where some years after winning WWII, the Germans and Japanese are plotting to attack one another. And, back in reality, America and Britain did once forge an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union.
On WMD, my guess is that such things as mustard gas and nerve gases of some sort are probably in Iraq somewhere. (Nerve gases are extremely hard to destroy quickly, and he certainly had them a few years ago. And I don’t believe he would have wanted to destroy them). My suspicion is that even if we find laboratories, I don’t think we will find anything terribly advanced in terms of nuclear or biological weapons, because building these things is quite hard. (I could be wrong here, and these things are so nasty that the possibility that I could be wrong might be a big enough justification for getting really worried, however. I remain rather more concerned about the possibility of terrorists getting a nuclear weapon from some disaffected Russians that I do that they would have got one from Iraq. (The prospect of North Korea having one or two nukes also scares the shit out of me).
This is more of a cautionary tale about paying attention to weasel-phrases such as “linked to”. I’ve no doubt Mr Chirac is linked to the current US administration. They’ve certainly exchanged ambassadors, corresponded in detail over matters of mutual concern, etc, etc. It doesn’t mean either supports the other or is likely to do what the other tells it, or wouldn’t grab at any opportunity to do the other down.
This is more of a cautionary tale about paying attention to weasel-phrases such as “linked to”. I’ve no doubt Mr Chirac is linked to the current US administration. They’ve certainly exchanged ambassadors, corresponded in detail over matters of mutual concern, etc, etc. It doesn’t mean either supports the other or is likely to do what the other tells it, or wouldn’t grab at any opportunity to do the other down.
I’m sceptical of these findings. I’ve no reason to doubt the journalist concerned but it seems at best extremely fortunate that this one room which survived the looting has provided so much sensitive information. If the intelligence services were doing their jobs properly these buildings would already have been scoured either by themselves or agents acting on their behalf.
As for this document, if I was running an intelligence agency responsible for maintaining power in a state as riven by factions as Iraq I would not be using tippex to obscure the names of sensitive contacts.
Journalists who are really good at “sources” have ways of being there firstest with the mostest, so it’s no surprise there at all. The big difference in this battle was that journalists were not under lock and key, especially with Iraq having more holes per square centimeter than any sieve.
Looks like some serious straining to justify the war!
A look through US archives would probably find “links” to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Hamas, and many other fun folk.
Gov’t try to find common causes or bridges to everyone — both friends and enemies. It’s called diplomacy.
Proof of a link would mean, to me, evidence of common action against Coalition nations.
No serious straining on my part, Larry. To me the issue of the Al Qaeda link was not at all central to my support for the war. Certainly it would make the case even stronger but for me such externalities are less important that the desire to see all tyrannies be put to the sword one way or another.
The difference between the diplomatic relationship between the US gov’t and, say, France and what is coming out of the Iraqi “archives” is transparency. Shocking as it may be, the US has an embassy in France: one looks in the phone book for the address. The Iraqi-Al Qaeda link was denied by the authorities.
The really interesting link is between Iraq and France. There was a rumor floating in the blogshere than the French aircraft carrier was providing signals intelligence for Iraq. It pulled out a week or two before things got hot.
The difference between the diplomatic relationship between the US gov’t and, say, France and what is coming out of the Iraqi “archives” is transparency. Shocking as it may be, the US has an embassy in France: one looks in the phone book for the address. The Iraqi-Al Qaeda link was denied by the authorities.
The really interesting link is between Iraq and France. There was a rumor floating in the blogshere than the French aircraft carrier was providing signals intelligence for Iraq. It pulled out a week or two before things got hot.
Larry
“A look through US archives would probably find “links” to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, Hamas, and many other fun folk.
Gov’t try to find common causes or bridges to everyone — both friends and enemies. It’s called diplomacy.”
So do I take it that the argument that the USA should not wage war on the Iraqi regime because it used to ‘support’ the Iraqi regime can be discounted?
1. Can you find a better Iraq-Bin Laden link than this?
2. We believe govt claims despite:
Senator Wants Fake Iraq Documents Probed
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI on Friday to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq’s nuclear program.
An investigation should “at a minimum help to allay any concerns” that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents.
“It came from other sources,” Powell told a House committee Thursday. “We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the inspectors.” …
The Decline and Fall of American Journalism (Part LXV): the Case of Judy Miller
…The days passed, and each excited bellow of discovery of WMD caches on the road north from Kuwait yielded to disappointment. Then came Judith Miller’s story in the New York Times. The smoking gun at last! Not exactly, as we shall see. But first a word about the reporter. If ever someone has an institutional interest in finding WMD in Iraq it’s surely Miller, who down the years has established a corner in creaking Tales of Terrorism, most of them bottle-fed to her by Israeli and US intelligence.
It was Miller who served up Khidir Hamza, the self-proclaimed nuclear bombmaker for Saddam, later exposed as a fraud. It was Miller who last year whipped up an amazing confection in the Times, blind-sourced from top to toe, about a Russian biowar scientist (sounding suspiciously like Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love, and since deceased) ferrying Russian smallpox to Saddam. At least the Times’s headline writer tried to keep things honest this time. “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert.”
What did who say and who did the asserting? It turns out that Miller, in bed with the entire 101st Airborne, had been told by “American weapons experts” in a group called MET Alpha that they have been talking to “a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program,” that the Iraqis destroyed chemical weapons days before the war and that “Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990’s, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda.”
Now isn’t that just what you’d expect him to say? And if you were an Iraqi scientist looking for quick passage out of Iraq to the USA, isn’t that just what you would say, in a series of unverifiable claims all fragrant to American nostrils?
Miller does concede that the MET Alpha group would not tell her who the scientist was, would not allow her to question him (assuming it wasn’t a “her,” maybe Lotte Lenya in a later incarnation) or do anything more than look at him from a great distance as he stood next to what was billed to Miller as a dump for “precursors” for chemical weapons. (Come to think about it, it’s probably a recycling facility for used cans of Roundup).
Furthermore, she wasn’t allowed to write about the unnamed Iraqi scientist for three days, and even then US military censors went over her copy line by line. What convenient disclosures this Iraqi allegedly offers, tailor-made to buttress Rumsfeld’s fist-shaking at Syria and Bush and Powell’s claims that Saddam and Osama bin Laden worked hand in glove, a claim that depended originally on an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker last year. At least Goldberg talked to the man claiming Osama/Saddam ties, although he made no effort to check the man’s “evidence,” subsequently discredited by less gullible journalists.
With Miller we sink to the level of straight press handout. I guess Miller, who’s apparently writing a sequel to her last book, on bioterror, needs to stay on the good side of MET Alpha….
Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies
The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. “They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat,” the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, “Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies”, he added: “You can draw your own conclusions.”
…On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were “very low” for the “foreseeable future”.
…Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to have been assigned to the quest for “unconventional weapons” – the less emotive term which is now preferred.
No, it means that Washington can’t sell their precious war as pure good vs. pure evil.
I first read about an al Qaeda connection with Saddams’ regime in the book In the Name of Osama bin Laden, Global Terrorism and the bin Laden Brotherhood by Roland Jacquard.
Jacquard is a French Strategic and Terrorism Expert/Consultant to the UN Security Council and I believe as well as Chirac.
Another book I recommend highly is Al-Qaeda by Jane Corbin.
Just to point something out to that master of irrelevent facts called Scott, that Rumsfeld had ‘links’ to Saddam Hussain would be a very interesting fact is Donald Rumsfeld had been the mastermind behind crashing aircraft into the Pentagon and WTC on Sept 11. For all I know Colonel Sanders may have met with Saddam Hussain and shook his hands prior to setting up a chain of KFCs in Baghdad. So what? Al Qaeda, and anyone who gave them aid and comfort, is a legitimate target of the USA. It would seem Iraq was in that category after all, just like the US government said all along and covering your ears and shouting “lalalala, I can’t hear you” ain’t gonna change that
Yes, but if Saddam was involved in 9/11, and Rumsfeld had ‘links’ to Saddam (for Reasons Of State, not for selling chicken), then anything said about Saddam applies to Rumsfeld. You cannot say that only the meetings that show what you want people to believe count, and others do not.
Scott, by that logic, if anyone who had link to the Saddam Hussain regime is as bad as anyone else…
…then I guess the Swiss Guards at the Vatican had better dig in because the US Marines will be arriving any time now.
Clearly the fact that a terrorist leader behind sept. 11th seems to have indeed had links to Saddam’s regime is rather more important that the fact Jaques Chirac, the Pope, Don Rumsfeld or Joe the Rug Merchant had dealing with him.
Bush and Blair did not say “We are going to attack Iraq because someone, somewhere, may have had dealing with Saddam Hussain”… They said he had links to Al Qaeda and that posed an unacceptable threat, given Saddam’s animus to the west. I did not believe them but I guess it was true after all. It does not matter to me for the reasons I have all ready stated but clearly it is important politically.
The Pope never shared military intelligence with the likes of Saddam, did he? The Pope didn’t aid in Saddam’s rise to power, did he? The Pope isn’t dropping cluster bombs on anyone who suddenly became Pure Evil once they were no longer useful, is he? You cannot say that only links to Bin Laden count, because that gives you what you want, but links to any other Bad People can be dismissed, because they don’t give you what you want. If you can prove a specific connection between Saddam and 9/11, that would be relevant. Otherwise, everyone meets with everyone.
Do you even care if the government was dishonest about WMDs, etc? You say it doesn’t matter to you, but you seem perfectly OK with people believing it, whether it is a lie or not, as long as they support what you want them to support.
Would it bother you if the same governments responsible for Perry’s War and travesties like the Patriot Act (one goes with the other, if you lie down with the dogs of war, you get up with the fleas of Big Brother) were lying to get their way on both issues?
Scott,
Didn’t Saddam murder many thousands of Iraqis ?
Didn’t he start two wars of aggresion, causing more than a million deaths ? Is all this a Miller/CIA fabrication ? Doesn’t that count at all ?
Isn’t it reasonable to fear that someone who did all that might do more of the same ?
Then we’re back with the question of how many tyrants are you willing to overthrow, how many countries are you willing to occupy, and what are your selection criteria?
I’ve yet to hear anyone in the War Party come right out and say how many Iraqis they are willing to see die to maintain occupation, or how many countries they are willing to invade and occupy. The usual debate with a warmonger goes like this:
Sane Person: Where are the WMDs?
War Monger: All you care about is your own worthless hide, you selfish bastard. What about the liberated, happy people of Iraq?
SP: If we had a moral obligation to free Iraq, then don’t we have the same obligation to free everyone else?
WM: The difference is that Iraq has WMDs and can therefore kill millions of us, but you hate yourself and your country and so probably think we all deserve to die, you bastard.
SP: So again, where are the WMDs?
WM: All you care about is your own worthless hide, you selfish bastard. What about the liberated, happy people of Iraq?……
If the task can be done without the cure being worse than the disease, then do it. If not, then don’t… at least not whilst the current circumstances prevail. Ones works with the tools available, however imperfect. Where to stop? If possible, overthrow every tyranny in the world, starting with the easiest and moving up the list. Taking out the Communists in China in the manner as the Ba’athists in Iraq was is clearly not a sensible course of action, but I do believe in actively trying to find alternative ways of undermining the Chinese government. I have said this many times. I believe someone else called it “Operation Perpetual Whoopass”.
The idea that you can actually say “if x will die, then it is ok, but if x + 1, then forget it” is simplistic tosh. The cost/benefit of a military adventure takes a bit more thought to weigh than that: just because some tyranny is moral to oppose with violence does not automatically make that a good idea in practice. If people stared shooting at taxmen in the USA, that would not keep me awake at night but I would not recommend it as a suitable course of action! The degree of tyranny is not unimportant: I regard planning laws as illegitimate abridgements of liberty but blowing up the local planning board seems rather disproportionate to the crime.
Although there indeed are exceptional circumstances in which I would urge people to use force against tyranny in places like Britain or the USA, let alone Iraq, clearly the cost and consequences of doing so in an attempt to impose a more liberty conducive order make that approach an absurdity as a general strategy, at this point in time, in those places…and the risks of in fact making the cause of liberty weaker in the USA or UK by using violence vastly outweighs the likely benefits. Unlike Iraq, no one from outside has the wherewithal or inclination to save us from Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and as violence is likely to be highly counterproductive, we are left with politics and other related courses of action.
As it seemed to me that it would be highly unlikely that things could get worse in Iraq than they were under Saddam, and happily Saddam had pissed off the sort of people who could indeed get rid of him, in my judgement the calculus produced a rather different result in that case.
One just makes a judgement on the available information and if the cost and probable outcome seem to justify the attempted overthrow of <insert name of tyranny here> then I am all for it. It not, then… not. I have said this all before, so if you just keep repeating yourself because you don’t like the answer, I will just ignore you, particularly as you are intermittently being rather rude.
So in a similar tone, your position seems to be ‘just let them all die and mind your own business’. Of course I have no idea if “fuck ’em, they were only Arab being killed by other Arabs” features somewhere in your thinking, but seeing as we are at the stage of making baseless accusations and lame straw man arguments…
Syria? Iran? North Korea? Libya? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? Who do you believe should be next on the list?
I’m not talking about x vs x + 1, but I am talking about x vs 10x vs 100x….. Is it too much to ask for some estimate of casualites before a war, and some idea about what acceptable losses will be?
Its not that I don’t like your answer, its that you refuse to give any specifics. You say “if the cost and probable outcome seem to justify” but refuse to say anything specific about the costs. What are the costs and benefits to liberating Syria or Iran? Is there another country whose liberation would be worth the cost, and what do you expect that cost to be? Do you assume every tyrant will fall in a week like Saddam did, is that your upper bound for acceptable costs, and where does actually occupying these countries fit into your budget?
What about the cost at home, as the government pushes for new police powers to defend us from the same people they plan to attack abroad? Is a “liberated” Syria worth Patriot II, Patriot III, etc?
Given their past history of being perfectly willing to install foreign authoritarian governments, do you have any reason for your faith that the government will do something right this particular time?
The only thing you’ve been willing to commit to is that China is currently off the invasion list. Do you have any other specific tyrannies for which you demand an invasion and occupation to remove? You know what’s out there, tyrant-wise. Who dies next?
Saddam, for all his faults, wasn’t planning to kill all the Arabs. Did we run across an Auschwitz/Birkenau (and I mean a gas chamber and oven death camp for millions, not a prison for thousands) somewhere in Iraq that I didn’t catch in the news?
Hussein was the largest money-launderer in the world. To think there were no links is stretching cred. Wasn’t Chamberlain surprised because the bolshies and nazis hooked up? Of course they would never work together, they hate each other! WRONG WRONG WRONG!
And–Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents.
“It came from other sources,” Powell told a House committee Thursday. “We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided…–
The rumor mill says the source was our greatest ally, france.
There’s more things going on behind the scenes than we know. There’s a bigger game going on than changing the ME.
Scott, you can kid yourself I have not answered you, but I have. If you don’t like the answers, that is not my problem. You can try to spin what I write to mean anything you like, but I am not sure why you expect me to take the bait and engage you in endless dissection of what I think I have made pretty clear.
You ask for how many thousands is an ‘acceptable’ cost in lives? It is unanswerable. I was supportive of the people of former Yugoslavia who broke away from Belgrade, which I watched first hand and up close over several years… that sequence of wars cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced even more. Are BiH, HR, SLO all now paragons of liberty? No. On balance are they better off now than under Yugoslav communism? Yes I think so. Was it worth the cost? Yes, it probably was. It seems to me that Iraq was liberated on the cheap by comparison. You want a firmer answer than that? Sorry, that is as good as answers about such things ever get in the real world.
If you ask something that either makes little sense to me or is meaningfully unanswerable the way you want it answered, there is not much a can do about that.
I have a completely different take on the reasons the U.S. fought this war. In the ’80s the U.S. was more alarmed about Islamic fundamentalism taking root in middle eastern countries than with Saddam. That I believe was our motivation in tolerating his shit. But in the ’90s that changed with his aggressive actions against his neighbors, it was destabilising the region.
But the reason this war had to occur was to put the Islamists and terrorist on notice that we were pissed, we had the means to crush them, we weren’t afraid to use those means, and anybody who wanted a piece of us had better think twice. And it will work. Because these people understand and respect resolve and power.
They had been given a lot of bad advice by some of their European friends, and they acted upon it. They British were a godsend to help us. But they U.S. completely crushed that country, and everyone, and I mean everyone, knows it; even the French. An example is a great learning device for the unconvinced.
I have a completely different take on the reasons the U.S. fought this war. In the ’80s the U.S. was more alarmed about Islamic fundamentalism taking root in middle eastern countries than with Saddam. That I believe was our motivation in tolerating his shit. But in the ’90s that changed with his aggressive actions against his neighbors, it was destabilising the region.
But the reason this war had to occur was to put the Islamists and terrorist on notice that we were pissed, we had the means to crush them, we weren’t afraid to use those means, and anybody who wanted a piece of us had better think twice. And it will work. Because these people understand and respect resolve and power.
They had been given a lot of bad advice by some of their European friends, and they acted upon it. They British were a godsend to help us. But the U.S. completely crushed that country, and everyone, and I mean everyone, knows it; even the French. An example is a great learning device for the unconvinced.
This I believe was the reasoning. The people we wanted to get the message, they got it. Everything else is spin and mental maturbation.
Regarding the original post by Perry, I broadly agree. I think also what has tipped the issue for me in favour of taking down Saddam was the wide number of linkages here. No one single factor, no one single causus belli, was needed. We had the whole set of factors with Iraq:
Iraq is a sponsor of terror.
Saddam has sought, and gone on the record about this, to get WMDs
He has shown total lack of trustworthiness.
He has used WMDs
The presence of his regime made it harder for the US to get tough with other terror sponsors, like Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Those countries will now be a lot more careful. Good.
The trouble with a lot of the kind of points made by Scott, is that, while not lacking for nice internal logic, they essentially evade such stark facts of life or assume that if we just mind our own business, the Saddams and OBLs of this world will leave us alone. This is the blind spot for libertarian purists, in my view. It is the “Galt’s Gulch” mindset that would have us deal with foreign affairs by hiding under a bunker. (Until we get a L-5 style space colony Scott, that aint a reasonble option).
I
Johnathan, Saddam didn’t attack us (and wasn’t any more capable of attacking us than any other random thug), so I wasn’t just hoping to be left alone. Sticking our noses in other people’s business paints a target on all our backs, and it makes perfect sense to take that into account.
Saddam link to al-Qaeda in doubt
Sandy, the rumor mill blaming the hated French doesn’t excuse our governments passing on lies. Am I allowed to ask what your “bigger game” is, or is my job just to shut up and obey?
Perry, I wanted specifics because “I support the invasions I support” is giving the government a blank check, which I do not want to do. I don’t trust the State as much as you do (despite your claims not to trust it).
Do you expect an invasion of Syria, and will it please you? When we have Sandy saying there’s a “bigger game” going on, I sorta want to know what the government is up to.
And as far as the Yugoslav losses go, didn’t the people there have a bit more involvement and take a more active role in what happened than the Iraqis? I don’t remember us marching on Belgrade and unilaterally removing Tito.
Perry, do you even want to know if the government has another invasion planned, and if you want to know, why do you want to know?
“Saddam didn’t attack us”.
No, he did not, at least directly. So, being a strict anti-interventionist (I assume you are one) you would only act once or if a direct attack had been launched on the West by Iraq. In other words, we can only act after a bloody great mushroom cloud or pall of chemical dust is floating over the Thames or Potomac.
And your stance also must assume that Saddam is/was basically rational, deterrable. And the argument from the pro-war side is that his 20+ years of power have rather muddied that assumption. His invasion of Kuwait and Iran and his subsequent deceit of the UN hardly suggested he was particularly rational, in my book.
Anyway, with Saddam out of the way, the need for pre-emption against other dirtbag states has been significantly reduced. A case of pour enourager les autres, to quote the French (heh!)
Yes, Johnathan, Scott falls into the ostrich catagory
You don’t need a mushroom cloud to justify attacking, but you do need hard proof of an immediate threat. Otherwise, you are with the Global Warming crowd (“something really bad might happen and we cannot take the chance”).
Didn’t we deter Saddam from using WMDs in Gulf War I?
Snide, an “ostrich” would be hiding from a provable, immediate threat, not a hypothetical one.
‘Peaceful’ nuclear power fuels spread of weapons
… The world is teetering on the brink of a new nuclear arms race. Countries are seeking to get the deadliest of weapons as it becomes clear their neighbors and regional rivals are already doing so, CIA Director George Tenet recently told Congress.
The “domino theory of the 21st century may well be nuclear,” Tenet said.
A major way such a dangerous arms race has become possible is the ready availability of a source of weapons material – ordinary nuclear power reactors.
Insecure nations are taking the nuclear technology provided for peaceful civilian purposes by the United States and other countries and using it to make military bombs.
The spread of nuclear weapons in unstable regions has become big news.
Only last year, India and Pakistan, both armed with atomic bombs and the missiles to deliver them, alarmed the world when they massed armies on their common border.
More recently, Iran and North Korea – spokes in what President Bush called the “axis of evil” – have kept the world wondering about their true intentions. Iran is using civilian nuclear energy technology that can be converted for nuclear weapons, and North Korea on Thursday said it already has weapons.
Now, in a world threatened by terror, the prospect of nuclear material from rogue regimes falling into terrorist hands has given new urgency to the problem.
Jon Wolfsthal, a former proliferation official at the Energy Department, cautions that just knowing how to operate a nuclear reactor doesn’t mean you can build a bomb.
But having a base of knowledge and an infrastructure to create electricity establishes a “dual use” technology.
With knowledge gained from building and operating a civilian power reactor, you get closer to the technologies you need for a weapon, says Wolfsthal, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And some countries, India in particular, “have used a peaceful power program as a cover to develop their nuclear weapons program.”
Many of these developing nations are exploiting the message sent indirectly from North Korea, Iran and even Iraq:
Build a nuclear weapon, and not even a superpower can tell you what to do. …
–Am I allowed to ask what your “bigger game” is, or is my job just to shut up and obey?–
My bigger game is peace, prosperity and security for the US and *the world* under a US “hegemon” which is preferable to all the rest. Oh, and go back to the moon and on to Mars.
We’re going to have to kill a lot to get peace, prosperity and security, tho.
–Build a nuclear weapon, and not even a superpower can tell you what to do. …–
That hasn’t been proven, yet, has it? There have been times, especially in the recent past, where Conventional Wisdom has been wrong. We’re not dealing w/the USSR any more. Even China’s learning the lesson w/kimchee. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
So, did you “shut up and obey” 1/1993-1/2001? Or are you an equal opportunity critic?
No, I didn’t “shut up and obey” when Baalzebubba was in office.
Peace, prosperity, and security aren’t the bigger game. They may be the stated goals of the bigger game, but it doesn’t address the question of who our government intends to invade next, if anyone.
The point of “build a nuclear weapon…” was that instead of telling the worlds thugs to behave or die, we may have told them to buy nukes from North Korea or die.
But the thugs of the world were already shopping around….Three weeks war or not. You have the timeline all wrong.
No amount of ‘policing’ is going to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons 100% – India managed to explode the bomb right under the watchful eye of the world, even while assuring the US embassador to India that no such thing would happen. Shock and awe from, what did you call Clinton, Baalzebubba? and his administration. That was well before Iraq. And even with India having the bomb, Pakistan ‘preemptively’ struck against India during Kargil in an attempt to push back the LOC. They didn’t need the US to teach them any geopolitical lessons. They taught the world a lesson, and we are still responding.
We are at a point in history, unfortunately, where the race is on. Really, really on. And the options are increasingly narrow and unappealing. And because the race is on, we have to make tough decisions in real time. That concept of real time is the backdrop to the discussion here. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know which of you is right and I don’t know if al Qaeda could or would have got WMD from Saddam, but as a physician by training I have a lot of sympathy with those who are elected to serve and protect and make real time decisions that impact the lives of others.
But the thugs of the world were already shopping around….Three weeks war or not. You have the timeline all wrong.
No amount of ‘policing’ is going to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons 100% – India managed to explode the bomb right under the watchful eye of the world, even while assuring the US embassador to India that no such thing would happen. Shock and awe from, what did you call Clinton, Baalzebubba? and his administration. That was well before Iraq. And even with India having the bomb, Pakistan ‘preemptively’ struck against India during Kargil in an attempt to push back the LOC. They didn’t need the US to teach them any geopolitical lessons. They taught the world a lesson, and we are still responding.
We are at a point in history, unfortunately, where the race is on. Really, really on. And the options are increasingly narrow and unappealing. And because the race is on, we have to make tough decisions in real time. That concept of real time is the backdrop to the discussion here. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know which of you is right and I don’t know if al Qaeda could or would have got WMD from Saddam, but as a physician by training I have a lot of sympathy with those who are elected to serve and protect and make real time decisions that impact the lives of others.
But the thugs of the world were already shopping around….Three weeks war or not. You have the timeline all wrong.
No amount of ‘policing’ is going to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons 100% – India managed to explode the bomb right under the watchful eye of the world, even while assuring the US embassador to India that no such thing would happen. Shock and awe from, what did you call Clinton, Baalzebubba? and his administration. That was well before Iraq. And even with India having the bomb, Pakistan ‘preemptively’ struck against India during Kargil in an attempt to push back the LOC. They didn’t need the US to teach them any geopolitical lessons. They taught the world a lesson, and we are still responding.
We are at a point in history, unfortunately, where the race is on. Really, really on. And the options are increasingly narrow and unappealing. And because the race is on, we have to make tough decisions in real time. That concept of real time is the backdrop to the discussion here. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know which of you is right and I don’t know if al Qaeda could or would have got WMD from Saddam, but as a physician by training I have a lot of sympathy with those who are elected to serve and protect and make real time decisions that impact the lives of others.
Er, sorry about the multiple posts.
Control freaks (like your average tyrant) don’t hand out WMDs to others, like Saddam hypothetically handing one to Osama. The USSR never did, and there’s no reason to assume Stalin was the one ‘sane’ tyrant of the bunch.
The world’s thugs were obviously shopping around for nukes, but we’ve just told them they have maybe a few months to a year to get one before they die.
Control freaks (like your average tyrant) don’t hand out WMDs to others, like Saddam hypothetically handing one to Osama. The USSR never did, and there’s no reason to assume Stalin was the one ‘sane’ tyrant of the bunch.
The world’s thugs were obviously shopping around for nukes, but we’ve just told them they have maybe a few months to a year to get one before they die.
MLD, multiple posts happen to the best of us. 🙂
While I must admit the ‘link’ is a bit ummm…convenient at the moment, that does not mean that some degree of cooperation did not exist. I have heard arguments that OBL would not cooperate with a “secular” state, but did he not receive training from the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? The US is a secular country and at least then he seemed willing to cooperate.
The MAD theory that kept an uneasy and odd peace for 50 years is no more. MAD is predicated upon “second strike”…then this meant “have enough nuclear sites survive to respond after a successful first strike on friendly soil.” However, second strike also means that you have to have a “return to sender.” Iraq or DPRK would be insane to directly attack the US. In about 20 minutes, Iraq would be glowing glass and the DPRK would cease to exist. However, *IF* Iraq or DPRK peddles off a WMD to a third party, a party without a nationality and a party without any kind of central structure to receive singularly devastating responses, then how can we respond? That is, a trans-national terrorist organization could cause MASSIVE damage, with little cost in retaliation. A relatively passive, respond only to direct-threat strategy doesn’t seem able to cope with these threats.
And if the USSR peddled off a nuke to a third party, wouldn’t that have bypassed MAD also (our nuke? prove it). Would you trust the likes of OBL to set off a nuke and not have it traced back to your nation-state?
This also leads to the question, “what Iraqi nukes”? Saddam didn’t have one to give away, and nobody has proven he was particularly close to having one.
“I have heard arguments that OBL would not cooperate with a “secular” state, but did he not receive training from the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?”
Actually, no. That’s part of the leftist “everything bad that ever happened anywhere is the CIA’s fault” mythology.
Bin Laden went to Afghanistan and received training, but it was the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) who trained the Afghan instructors. The CIA’s aid went to Pakistan, not directly to Afghanistan–which was a really stupid thing to do in itself, but I think it’s important to keep straight who did which stupid thing. 🙂
Training foreigners to fight in a guerilla war is actually the mission of the US Army Special Forces.
That said, I personally suspect bin Laden probably would be willing to work with a non-muslim country if it was to his advantage. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he bought a nuclear weapon from North Korea or a former Soviet country sooner or later.
ROUTLEDGE: SMOKING GUN STINKS OF SPOOKS
Apr 28 2003
Paul Routledge Chief Political Commentator
CALL me a cynic, as many do, but I have great difficulty in believing all the top-secret files cascading from the bombed-out ministries of Baghdad.
Here they are, just lying around on the floor waiting for eagle-eyed reporters to pick them up and phone their news editor.
Even more amazingly, every single document points the guilty finger at Saddam’s regime and those who questioned the Anglo-American war against Iraq.
They expose the perfidy of President Putin, the chicanery of President Chirac, the knavery of German intelligence, the alleged greed of George Galloway MP, and the terrorist link-up with the head of al-Qaeda.
How fortunate! What a coincidence! And how convenient they should all be discovered by journalists working for papers that back Bush all the way.
Of course, there could be another explanation. It could be that the security services, in this business up to their ears, have had a hand.
SO far, the much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction have not been found. The Iraqi dictator has not been found. Nor has Osama bin Laden.
And if they cannot be found, what better than hard, documentary evidence that can be splashed all over friendly newspapers?
The reaction of the CIA to yesterday’s latest exposure, purporting to establish a Saddam-Osama connection, is illuminating.
“This sounds like a find,” said an official. A find? Is that all he can say? If true, this is not just a smoking gun, but a whole battery of smoking artillery.
Forgive me if I smile, but where was the CIA when the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s secret service, fell to advancing American troops more than two weeks ago?
Does anybody expect me to believe they simply left these buildings to the tender mercies of western journalists, practically none of whom read Arabic?
Pull the other one. It has depleted-uranium bells on it.
Naturally, I may be wrong. But this fascinating exercise in war justification has all the hallmarks of the dirty tricks fusiliers.
Scott: “The world’s thugs were obviously shopping around for nukes, but we’ve just told them they have maybe a few months to a year to get one before they die.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Shana, it would be a bad thing if, by giving them the extra encouragement, they risk it all and actually get the nukes.
Shana, it would be a bad thing if, by giving them the extra encouragement, they risk it all and actually get the nukes.
Shana, it would be a bad thing if, by giving them the extra encouragement, they risk it all and actually get the nukes.