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

To: jcky who wrote (36955)	8/11/2002 1:43:04 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Unprovoked? Do you call a march toward Baghdad by American troops unprovoked from Saddam's point of view No IDF troops involved there. I do call it unprovoked to attack a third party and drag them into the war. Yes, it is dangerous to gun for Saddam, no doubt about it. Though as we clearly don't feel the same way about his generals, maybe some of them won't feel like dying or committing war crimes for an about to be toast supreme leader. It is possible that Saddam could be contained from attacking Israel. So it's worth a try for Sharon. It's possible he could be contained from reasserting himself as the chief power of the Gulf. But it's not at all certain. For containment to work, Saddam needs to be 1. rational 2. unwilling to tolerate risk beyond a certain level 3. believe in the threats 4. alive and around, not dead and succeeded by a psycopath like his son Uday The consensus of most of the well-informed people whom tek has pointed out on this thread seems to be that Saddam is probably containable now, though its a matter of debate -- does he believe our threats? after all, he got rid of the inpectors -- but probably will become very difficult to control after he gets nukes and the balance of power shifts. Ask yourself, would we be talking about regime change in Baghdad if Saddam had nukes this minute? Even if we assume that he's still rational, he's got a very aggressive track record with a high tolerance for risk. He's also a bad judge of Western reaction and might try something he thought he could get away with, but we found intolerable, like Kuwait. Also, containment is far from an easy option to implement. As I have said before, our current attempts at containment have broken down or are breaking down fast. We could not contain to any level that we were happy with, we would have to back down to some level of 'containment lite', with Saddam beating his chest in triumph all the while. My own mental image for the situation is an avalanche expert watching the snowpack build up on a slope known for killer avalanches. The expert knows the snowpack is in a dangerous condition and urges the use of explosives to trigger the avalanche. But even deliberately set-off avalanches are dangerous, and the people in the town below keep begging him not to do it. "Can't we just have stability?" they say. But the expert knows that stability is unlikely to be an option for much longer, and an unexpected avalanche is likely to do far more damage.