I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree...wish I could be as accepting of things I read as you are
I suppose...if you've been reading this thread then you know we've all had endless debates on the slant of various news sources and how to read articles and play 'connect the dots'. I would hardly describe my attitude (or that of other FADG participants either) as blind faith in what I read in the papers.
You have a very happy holiday.
You too.
Here is Christopher Hitchens' latest take on events, which you might find interesting:
Bush drives on to war
By Christopher Hitchens, Evening Standard
17 December 2002
All things press towards the event. At some level in Washington - indeed at several levels - the essential decision has been taken that Saddam Hussein will soon be gone. If I had to bet, I'd say that Valentine's Day - my preferred date for the celebration - might be a little early but April Fool's Day is probably putting it too late.
The enormous new American base in Qatar, which I visited a few weeks ago, is nearly ready, and a large chunk of US "Centcom" (Central Command) has been moved there from Florida. Thus, the reluctance of the Saudis to allow use of their facilities for an intervention - though it may yet be overcome - matters less. The Marines are in Kuwait. That's the southern front. Not far over the northern horizon, in Uzbekistan, airfields and supplies are being made ready. The Turks are being squared. Her Majesty's Government, indeed, is getting into the business of troop movements.
So if Saddam Hussein was suddenly to flaunt an undeclared weapons system, or be found putting a bomb into the Federal Reserve building, the general feeling might be that he had acted just slightly too soon for it to be convenient. We're not quite ready yet, would be the comment. It is believed, however, that there is no danger of his not furnishing a pretext when the time comes. Indeed, he seems to keep on providing them as if he wanted to be caught.
On Saturday 7 December, not content with handing over some laughable sheaves of grubby paperwork in response to the inspections demand, he also made a speech calling for a common front, with the forces of "jihad", against the British, the Americans and the Jews. He called on the bin-Ladenist forces in Kuwait to rise up and overthrow their government - an invocation of regime change that might possibly have been more prudently phrased. His deputy, Tariq Aziz, took the opportunity - after innumerable sleazy denials - to admit that his regime had after all gassed the Kurds at Halabja. Well, every little bit helps, and perhaps nobody told the Iraqi leadership that 7 December is Pearl Harbor Day. Looking back, I have the feeling that that may have been the day of no return. Saddam is evidently a man who does not now - if he ever did - have a firm grasp of the concept of self-preservation, which entails the awful possibility that his conception of deterrence and containment might be equivalently weak.
There's a very slight possibility that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika is operating a double bluff, and is ready to move even more quickly at the first provocation. But this is not going to be a psychological war.
The fact is that a climatic "window" exists, which makes desert fighting less harsh and less heated, and this window starts to close by March. The plan is for large concentrations of troops to arrive from all directions and, having dealt with such Iraqi officers as are still willing to obey Saddam's orders, to establish authority over most of the country. Food and medicine and newspapers will be lavishly handed out. The regime's radar will be blinded and its air force grounded. Among the Kurds of the north and the Shi'a of the south, it is not expected that there will be mass demonstrations against this development.
Saddam Hussein has said, again with extreme imprudence, that he will force the coalition armies to take Baghdad street by street. The idea is that this compels them both to take, and equally importantly to inflict, heavy casualties. (That's how much he thinks his personal survival matters to his martyred country.) But he can't force them to that, can he? They can wait, while he gibbers in some palatial bunker and while the Shi'a slum-dwellers around Baghdad, and the rest of the citizens, make up their own minds.
There are, of course, two possible nightmare scenarios and I had them both laid out for me recently by a senior person who thinks about them night and day. The first nightmare is that Saddam - who appears even from Baghdad TV to be decomposing mentally - decides on some final Caligula-type deed. Using the weapons he says he doesn't have, for example, he might poison or infect a large number of troops and civilians, either in "his" country or in some neighbouring one.
The second nightmare is that some boasted American "smart" bomb does something vile, such as hit a hospital full of sick children. Neither contingency can be absolutely forestalled.
But Iraqi commanders are being warned daily - including warnings from the Iraqi opposition - that if they obey any rash or genocidal order they will be numbered among the last people who will die in defence of a doomed regime. And the "smartness" of at least some of the American arsenal has, as was proved in Afghanistan, increased considerably since the last Gulf War.
But this has all come about, don't forget, as a worst-case scenario in the first place. In the best one-volume advocacy of a war, the former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack (who predicted the invasion of Kuwait and was ignored or ridiculed by his superiors) describes it as the "least worst" option. It is the outcome of many previous failures and disasters and betrayals. Pollack's book has the admittedly awful title The Threatening Storm, but you aren't truly informed until you have digested its contents.
The logic says that it's fight Saddam now, or confront him later on terrain of his choosing, or let him walk away as a winner. So we are stuck somewhere between The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day.
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