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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (11682)	11/27/2001 10:36:10 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Objective: Democracy Washington Post OpEd washingtonpost.com By R. James Woolsey Tuesday, November 27, 2001; Page A13 Oh, this one is cute. Woolsey will just grab any argument he can find to mount a campaign against Iraq. Perhaps he's given up on the "establish a link" argument, which Kagan has. And now he's arguing that because the population is oppressed, we should bomb. Hmmm, an argument about a rather good many countries. John

To: FaultLine who wrote (11682)	11/27/2001 1:10:10 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, this article does mention the basic reason they didn't just take out Saddam during the Gulf war when the time was ripe. There was a real fear of the effects a vacuum of power would have brought on, especially with the Kurds in the eastern part of Turkey. It might have been a royal mess. But it was and is totally unrealistic to think that economic sanctions and a cat and mouse game of inspections would keep any of these totalitarian regimes in line. Has this ever worked?? Simple economic common sense will tell anyone that economic sanctions will destroy a civilian economy, leaving the regimes which are hardly running welfare states, intact. I don't know what we're going to do about Iraq, but at least we don't appear to be following the same path in Afghanistan. Before the stuff with the USSR started, Afghanistan was religiously moderate and on the way to modernization. I believe there's nothing intrinsic to prevent that from happening again.