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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (19408)	8/16/2002 6:24:30 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) of 21057

Leveling cities will probably cause more hatred and post war problems, but I do admit it would make the war itself easier. The "that's actually a good thing" comment referred to the fact that I would rather not see Americans intentionally killing hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians. If that is what it would take to stop Saddam's WMD program then I would rather just run the risk of Saddam getting WMD, while making it as clear as possible that if he ever uses them against us we will end his rule of Iraq even if it means ending a lot of Iraq at the same time. Saddam might at some time in the future try something with conventional forces and then threaten to use WMD (no s at the end like RBI) against us if we did intervene but I would take that risk rather then kill a couple of million Iraqis. OK to be fair to you, you are only suggesting that we could level a smaller city (say population 50,000, killing maybe 20,000) and the rest of Iraq would surrender, so you aren't talking about millions of Iraqi deaths. But I'm not sure this would work, it might result in less conventional city fighting but even more guerilla warfare as the Iraqis and the rest of the Arabs come to hate us with a passion, and it would be considered a black mark on the US's reputation for years, so I still don't like the idea. We've already had more then one debate about using nukes to end WWII so I don't want to go in to that again, but even those who think it was wrong probably would consider it more justified in the context of global total war then in the context of the Middle East today. BTW - When I said "that's actually a good thing.." I was also referring to "and the entire nation is focused on the objective above all other concerns". Its a good thing that the situation is not so bad that we have to be concerned at that level, and its a good thing that we don't have to have 25 million men under arms and a $4 trillion defense budget (take the WWII figures and scale them for our population and economic growth and you get a military about that big). Tim

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