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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (171596)	7/3/2003 7:53:34 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 1582945

You are speculating again. You asked how do I know that Saddam wasn't just about to fall. Such a question calls for speculation, unless one of us can accurately predict the future and my crystal ball broke down and is no longer under warranty. Speculation is meaningless; its one step below fantasy. Any time that someone is thinking about or debating over what should have been done or what we should do now speculation is required. Information is never perfect and total esp. information about the future. I speculate that the sun will not go nova within the next two months so I don't quite my job, sell my house and use up all my wealth traveling or partying. Can we really know that Saddam would not have fallen over and died the next time a stiff breeze blew through Baghdad of course not. Similarly we can not know that Intel won't declare bankruptcy or go to $10bil per share when the market opens on Tuesday. But a reasonable person can examine possibilities without drifting off in to fantasy and I'm not going to sell all my other holding to buy puts or calls on Intel on Monday. The USSR was, in some ways, more ruthless than Saddam. Who would have thought that economics would have brought them to their knees and caused their collapse? Stalin was probably more ruthless then Saddam. Maybe even some of the other Soviet leaders, but Gorbachov and even the leaders that preceded him where not. If Gorbachov was as ruthless as Saddam he could have kept the Soviet Union together for years longer, perhaps indefinitely. The Soviet Unions collapse came after the better part of a century and after not having as brutal of leader as Saddam for years. A collapse easily might not have happened in 10 years or even 20. But I assumed for the sake of argument that we could count on no more Saddam (or equivalently nasty Bathist party rule) in 10 years. But those 10 more years would have been worse then the invasion. If there was a strong shot that it might have been 1 year then I might have opposed the invasion but I don't think the odds of Saddam being kicked out of power in one year (esp. when you add the provision that no equivalently nasty person succeed him) were very high. Tim

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