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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: Dayuhan who wrote (15818)	11/10/2003 11:07:33 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	of 793868

Pollack’s postwar writings indicate that he thought the war was pursued in an unnecessarily hasty and unnecessarily unilateral fashion, and that both trends will ultimately damage US objectives. It’s easy to classify your preferred course of action as a “least bad” option if you ignore most of the other options. You have just completely side-stepped Pollack's entire argument about why the Iraq war was a least-bad option - which, far from ignoring the other options, went through them exhaustively. Pollack has taken issue with the timing and implementation of the war. I think most of his criticisms are quite oddly politically naive - as if President Bush could have set out to time the war based on Mideast criterea alone while ignoring pesky domestic distractions, like the election cycle. This is just unrealistic. But Pollack has never changed his mind on the geopolitical necessity of toppling Saddam - which was the subject we were discussing, in case you've forgotten. As for Haliburton, this is an effort to find a scandal where none exists. Sure, Haliburton is going to make money. But they are not going to make billions and billions like TotalFinaElf was if sanctions got lifted, and they are not even a big contributor to the Bush administration. TotalFinaElf (aren't Chirac's in-laws board members?) had a huge stake in getting sanctions lifted in the form of immensely profitable contracts that would take effect only if, and just by some coincidence France has made it their business to work for that end for the last five years and more. Why were French diplomats promising Saddam they could get him off the hook this time? Why did France care so much about preserving Saddam? We now know one reason at least - Saddam was bribing them directly. I know why Bush wanted to get rid of Saddam, and throwing work to Halliburton didn't even register on that scale. As we say in America, that dog won't hunt. Unless of course you work for the BBC, where every other sentence sounds like "blah blah blah Halliburton blah blah Halliburton". But somehow they can never come up with the clincher of the "scandal" beyond the fact that Halliburton got a contract.

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