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

To: SirRealist who wrote (16638)	1/17/2002 6:35:05 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi SirRealist; Re: "Can't we confine it simply to whether or not we should?" [Topple the Iraqi regime.] I think that we should either kill Saddam, or make peace with him. By "kill", I really mean take him out of power. With the right intelligence that could be done without too many deaths. We've got the precision munitions to do it now. We don't have to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi draftees to do it, because it's not like hundreds of thousands of draftees are occupying Kuwait City. I think there's a good chance this will happen, and it may bring a bit of improvement to the area. By "make peace" I mean to normalize relations, and call off the dogs of war. That won't be too pleasant for the Kurds in North Iraq, but the successor regime will eventually do the same thing up there. (Governments of all types are notorious for dealing harshly with separatists. About the only exception that immediately comes to mind is Czechoslovakia.) Our policy in Iraq has been unfortunate in that we should long ago have either killed Saddam and dealt with a successor regime, or we should have gotten out of their affairs. But hey, I've already stated this repeatedly. I've been saying the same thing for years and years. The problem with making peace with Iraq is that they are developing "Weapons of Mass Destruction". Forgive me, but since we're the best maker of WMDs in the world (I've helped design them), I really don't see how we can pretend to be a force for moderation and peace in the world when we bomb nations for doing what we ourselves are expert in. Also, we tend to do a bit of picking and choosing over who we punish for working on WMDs. Neutral countries notice this and it pisses them off. Someday we won't be the most powerful nation on the planet, we will be one among many. I'd like that time to be one where noninterference in other nation's affairs is expected. One of the results of the terror campaign may be that "noninterference" will have to be expanded to include the concept that a nation doesn't have the right to stir up hatred for an enemy among their citizens. Pakistan may be making steps in that direction, their president is apparently making the Madras (religious schools) teach the full set of standard subjects, instead of only the Koran (or their interpretation of it). I can only hope. Saddam largely brought Iraq's fate on their citizens himself by invading Kuwait. If they'd simply exploded their first nuke it's likely that we'd have left them alone, and our relations with Iraq would still be as friendly as when April Gillespie was the US Ambassador there. What it appears to me that we are going to do is to keep doing what we've been doing, which is not something that I'm in favor of. What I think is immoral about our policy is that it punishes the innocent without even trying to apprehend the guilty. I think that's immoral. You should either forgive the guilty and move on, or you should apprehend and punish the guilty, but to punish the innocent alone is immoral. In comparison, our bombing of Afghanistan was moral. We undoubtedly killed innocent people, but at the same time we also were (successfully) trying to put the guilty out of power. The result of our Afghanistan action is clear. Not only did we do the right thing, but our troops were cheered in the cities. Our embargo against Iraq has brought us little admiration. If instead we simply lifted the embargo against Iraq, maybe even gave them food aid, either with or without killing Saddam, it would be the right thing to do, and our actions would be applauded. I'm afraid that if we do attack Saddam (not Iraq), we'll probably give him our traditional "Dodge Sheriff" warning to clean up or get out of town, which will give him enough warning that it will become impossible to find him. I'd rather just wake up one morning to discover that we'd cleanly killed him. -- Carl