I see that everyone is still having fun here.
I've no intention of returning on any lasting basis, but I'm curious about how a couple of things are being presented and perceived in the US, and this is the easiest sounding board I can think of.
Is any attention being paid there to the US troop deployment in the Philippines? How is it being handled in the media, and how are politicians describing it? What are the cited objectives?
I of course have my own opinions, based on a certain amount of knowledge, but before letting them out I'd like to hear how it's being managed, as a PR exercise, on that side.
I'm also curious about how people perceive the effort to build a case against Iraq as the next target in the war against terror. Has any evidence been presented to show direct Iraqi support for or participation in terrorist activity?
I don't like Saddam any more than anybody else here, but I wonder how much attention is being paid to the potential adverse consequences of removing him. I see a lot of talk about the possibility of using the same proxy war technique against Saddam that we used against the Taleban. (I don't think anyone seriously wants to deploy 200,000 US troops to Iraq for an indefinite period, without any friendly basing area in sight.) Is anyone looking seriously, though, at the reasons the potential proxies have for fighting Saddam, and the payoffs they will want for serving as grunts in our war?
The most obvious proxies are the Shiites in southern Iraq. If they fight for us and win, though, their objective will be a fundamentalist Shiite Islamic state. These groups are closely tied to Iran and totally penetrated by - some would say effectively run by - the Iranian secret service. If they take over Iraq, the country will be in effect indistinguishable from Iran, forming a fundamentalist Shiite superstate in a strategic location. This is why the Saudis will not support any effort to remove Saddam: they don't like him any more than we do, but they feel that an ostracized Saddam is less a threat than the Shiite state that would very likely replace the Baath crowd. This is not, IMO, an unreasonable position.
The other potential proxies are the Kurds in the north, and they present problems of their own. If they fight, they will expect a payoff. They want a state of their own. They would probably be willing to settle for an autonomous region, but they would view that as a step on the way to an eventual goal. An autonomous state would almost certainly be used as a base for terrorist attacks against Turkey. Military equipment provided to the Kurds would almost certainly be used in terrorist attacks against Turkey.
This raises a significant issue. Are we fighting all terrorism, or just terrorism that threatens us? Some might argue that the Kurdish cause is legitimate. Certainly the Kurds are among the most oppressed people in the world. Anyone who would argue that the use of terror by Zionists in their pursuit of a national home was legitimate would be hard pressed to argue that the Kurdish use of terror is illegitimate.
If we remove Saddam from the equation, how much control will we really have over the situation? If we end up with an Iraq effectively partitioned into a Kurdish territory hostile to our allies and a Shiite territory closely allied to Iran, will we be serving our own interests?
No matter how emotionally unsatisfying it might be, it seems to me that our interests might be better served by leaving Saddam where he is, and devoting our efforts to keeping him as thoroughly marginalized as possible.
I'm also concerned about this "axis of evil" concept. How much evidence has been presented linking Iran and North Korea to organized terrorism? North Korea certainly has one of the worst governments on the planet, but are they an active threat to US security?
Are we fighting a war against terror, or a war against people we don't like?
I hope that we are devoting as much effort to the really important part of the war against terror - the effort to track down and uproot the terror networks entrenched in the West - as we are to the state-vs-state aspect.
Any thoughts? |
