The cockroach scenario doesn't work. The cockroach is in someone else's house eating somone else's food. Are you going to pay for the exterminator to kill the cockroaches in someone else's house at the other end of the city just in case they make it to your house? I think not.
I view one of the lessons of September 11 to be that cockroaches who espouse hatred and show a pattern of attacking and threatening others do threaten your house. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were in a remote mountain country. They could not reach us with missiles. We knew they were cockroaches. We had them under sanction. The UN had them under sanction. And did nothing about them until they killed thousands.
Again and again, they found ways to attack. The world, in my view, has changed. If someone in a culture of hatred and violence wants to take out a million or so Americans, they have figured out they don't need to get an ICBM; they need only get some terrible bioweapon or nuke and send a ship into one of our Eastern seaports. Or do something else disruptive and violent. And BTW, Saddam has spent quite a bit of effort over the years on bioweapons. The UN found quite a bit of that stuff in the late 1990's (which prompted Saddam to eject the inspectors). What, exactly, is the use of anthrax? What, exactly, does one use tons of biological growth media for, if not to develop weapons which will inflict disease on other human beings?
If you are looking for evidence that Saddam has done that, look no further than the UN's own reports, including this one from 1999:
srch1.un.org
<Scroll down to page 7 of this 16 page document for this part:>
22. UNSCOM uncovered the proscribed biological weapons programme of Iraq, whose complete existence had been concealed by Iraq until 1995. This and subsequent work has permitted [UNSCOM] to obtain significant insights into Iraq's biological warfare capabilities, including a broad understanding of the main delivery systems. UNSCOM has also gained a detailed, albeit incomplete, picture of Iraq's procurement activities for its biological warfare programme.
23. UNSCOM order and supervised the destruction of Iraq's main declared BW production and development facility, Al Hakam. Some 60 pieces of equipment from three other facilities involved in proscribed BW activities as well as some 22 tonnes of growth media for BW production collected from four other facilities were also destroyed. As a result, the declared facilities of Iraq's BW programme have been destroyed and rendered harmless.
Now, let's think about that for a few minutes. Iraq loses the Gulf War and agrees to resolutions that prohibit it from having biological weapons of mass destruction. It claims for FOUR YEARS thereafter that is has no such weapons. With inspectors crawling around the country, the weapons are not found until one day the inspectors stumble across some evidence and the Iraqis admit that, oh yes, they do have a biological weapons capability, but it's all in this one building, you see.
So the UN goes into that building, finds 22 TONS of "growth media" for biological warfare and destroys them.
Let's read the next paragraph of the UNSCOM report:
24. In the biological area, Iraq's Full Final and Complete Disclosure (FFCD) has not been accepted by UNSCOM as a full account of Iraq's BW programme. A full disclosure of the scope and nature of the programme was considered outstanding by UNSCOM. The briefing indicated that this evaluation was corroborated by technical evaluation meetings called by UNSCOM including at the request of Iraq. The briefing also indicated that critical gaps need to be filled to arrive at a reasonably complete picture. It has also been recognized that due to the fact that BW agents can be produced using low technology and simple equipment, generally dual-use, Iraq possesses the capability and knowledge base through which biological warfare agents could be produced quickly and in volume.
There is a valid difference of opinion about how to deal with these developments. Some think that isolating ourselves from it, leaving the cockroaches alone until they bother us, is less likely to provoke them. I think the risk/reward of that approach is not very good. I wouldn't mind seeing the rhetoric of our government change a bit. But the substance of the policy, which seems to be to confront these cockroaches where they live, is something I approve of. |
