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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (2546)	3/13/2002 9:22:51 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

That seems explicit enough, though it stops well short of giving sufficient reason for war (in my opinion, at least) and fails to address the fairly significant question of how we plan to "deal with him". It is not an easy situation. Using proxies worked in Afghanistan; it is much less likely to be effective in Iraq. Neither of the available proxies, the Kurds and the Shiites, has an organized fighting force capable of ground combat on any significant scale. Support for either would cause major problems with regional allies, and force us to pretzel the logic of the war on terrorism: the Kurds are almost certain to use any support we provide in terrorist attacks against Turkey, an ally of ours, and the Shiites are deeply connected to - many would say controlled by - Iran, another axis of evil member. Either way, support for proxies would involve support for actual or probable terrorist groups. Doing our own dirty work would require a deployment involving hundreds of thousands of troops, a logistic nightmare, especially since our regional allies are not likely to provide bases for an effort that they feel is contrary to their interests. I think I've said all this before. I wonder what they have in mind, and how it will sit politically if it turns out to be less easy than the involvement in Afghanistan. One fallout of the Gulf war and the Afghan deployment (I hesitate to call it a war) is that many have come to expect all such efforts to succeed as quickly and with as little cost in lives. That in turn encourages us to take bigger bites, and to be less thorough about checking for bones.