Here are some more reasons not to move now, from a friend on another forum:
It's obvious how to stop them, eh?
I've been mulling this over.
For a long time, the US has had all but unstoppable power. We've never used it, not as much as we could. We have always taken the moral high ground, which was, basically, "If you want to start something, we're willing to finish it."
Iraq started something by invading Kuwait. This threatened our interests, and so we finished it.
Somebody started something with the September 11 attacks. Evidence pointed to immediate support for that activity by the "government" of Afghanistan, so we went and kicked over a lot of anthills.
But now President Bush wants to do a first military strike to overthrow a foreign government. Why? Because they have weapons of mass destruction? Because they have talked to other people about their dislike of America? Because they thumbed their nose at his daddy? Because he is desperate to keep this artificial "war on terrorism" going because it will keep his poll numbers up, allowing him to continue to enact all kinds of laws near and dear to the hearts of radical conservatives under the protective rubric of "national security"?
Basically, the "Bush Doctrine" is "If we don't like you, we'll topple you."
The world isn't going to be happy about that. I don't care all that much about what makes the world happy, but it is an awkward thing to ask everybody else to live with. And it makes it hard to tell the difference between us and any other bunch of thugs.
Besides, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Here is the result of my mulling:
America launches its attack on Iraq, after months of Desert Shield-like preparation. Iraq is run by a nutcase, a person totally overwhelmed with his own importance. The lives of his people, his troops, his relatives (he's been known to shoot his own relatives at staff meetings), mean no more to him than the lives of his enemies. If we commit ourselves to removing him from power, we leave him with nothing to lose. So:
Possibility: Iraq has no effective weapons of mass destruction. So, eventually, we end up deposing Saddam Hussein, and then have the booby prize of trying to run Iraq, a nation totally used to being run by a despot and probably unable to conceive of anything like a republican/democratic form of government. Lucky us.
Other possibility: Iraq has effective weapons of mass destruction. So, what does their nutcase ruler do with them? I'll tell you what he does with them. While we do our coalition thing, and spend months moving people into position, he loads them into missiles, or into trucks, and transports them to Israel and sets them off there -- that's what he does with them. Or, maybe, he lobs them -- or trucks them -- towards Riyadh, or wherever it is that a quarter million American military personnel have set up shop for Operation "Bolster Those Poll Numbers", and sets them off there.
Either way, the only available response to somebody with Bush's "moral clarity" will be an airburst over Baghdad, not that Saddam will be there, which means additional slabs of glass elsewhere as we hear rumors about where he might be. And we still end up with the booby prize of running Iraq, except now some of it is radioactive, along with getting to pay most of the bill for rehabilitating those parts of Israel and/or Saudi Arabia that were nerve-gassed or nuked.
I have no quarrel with turning Saddam into a bunch of high-energy neutrons.
But it should be *after* he does something Really Bad. Not before. Any restraint he exhibits is because he figures we'll cause him a lot of trouble if he does something Really Bad. By attacking first, we remove any reason he has for restraint, which means he's likely to do something Really Bad anyway. That's assuming that he can -- and if he *can't* then what of our moral imperative to invade in the first place?
I hate to give away the moral high ground uselessly. We can never get it back again. |
