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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: carranza2 who wrote (18906)	2/15/2002 8:34:50 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) of 281500

How can Saddam someone who at the same time has taken deterrence to heart and still be an inveterate and almost pathological risk-taker, i.e., someone who is not subject to the punishing logic of deterrence? My reading of Pollack was that Saddam is rational by his own lights, but those lights are far too aggressive and prone to miscalculation for any comfort. Saddam knows how things play in the local neighborhood, but he doesn't understand non-Arab politics. He will probably not go nuclear if he believes that Iraq will be turned into a parking lot in return. The trick is to turn him into a believer. I think the Israelis have already gotten halfway there. I hope so, but with Saddam, you're never sure. If he gets nukes, he will be itching to use them somewhere, if only to take over neighboring countries and dare the world to risk a nuclear exchange. With Islamism and anti-Israel feeling at such a height, Saddam might figure that making a hero of himself to the Arab world by nuking Tel Aviv might be worth the Israeli response. After all, Iraq is a lot bigger than Israel, and Saddam and the Republican Guards will have safe bunkers.

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