Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (6053)	9/11/2002 12:22:51 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 89467

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: THE ONE WITH THE BAKSHEESH IN IT, STUPID TigerPaw, You are a wise man, and a wise guy. Your kind will not be tolerated in the new nation of Bushemerica(TM)(SM) pat. pending, LLC. Re: they need to be stopped You are too generous. They need to be flushed down the first available toilet. Re: you must practice how to genuflect to your new rulers. Some smart people once came up with a nifty state motto: "Live Free or Die". The Bushista junta is a criminal cabal that will meet resistance. They will not destroy our great nation for their pocketfuls full of black gold. We shall not, as a nation, be taken over by a an evil empire and the despot who would pretend to rule. We shall not enslave this great nation to His Royal Imperial Regal Majesty Grand Noble Knight Excalibur..... uhh, Dimmmed Down Dubya. Couldn't the puppet masters write a better script? How come this dumbya dufus has to be the designated deity? What's wrong with this picture?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (6053)	9/11/2002 9:30:04 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

President Bush Will Have to Shock the American People into War by Fergal Keane September 7, 2002 Over the last year I've made a couple of firm predictions. The first was that sooner or later George Bush would launch a war to topple Saddam Hussein; the second was that the American people would regain their sense of balance in the aftermath of the 11 September bombings – i.e. the country of the middle ground would reassert itself. The question now is whether the latter development – for it has come to pass – will cancel out the possibility of the first. Will the return to the center ground of the majority of American public opinion make it impossible for George Bush to rally domestic support for his plans to oust Saddam? A headline in yesterday's Washington Post spoke the truth when it declared: "Bush Faces Daunting Task in Building Public Support." It did not say "impossible task", but merely pointed to the danger of attacking Saddam when only 37 per cent of poll respondents believe Bush has clearly explained his rationale for a war with Iraq. If you are about to commit vast numbers of troops with a risk of mass casualties and the wholesale destabilization of the Middle East, then the least people deserve is an explanation. Thus has the doctrine of pre-emptive action, so passionately urged by the locker-room tendency on the right, come unstuck. The likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have been shown to be fearfully out of touch with public sentiment. Not so the worried congressmen and senators who have been besieged with letters, e-mails and calls from constituents. Across America there is an audible shout of "wait a minute". Set aside the so-called Vietnam syndrome, foreign wars have never been intrinsically popular in the US. Over the last decade the real crisis in international affairs has not been domineering Yankee power but the struggle to make America engage with the rest of the world. In Bill Clinton we saw an instinctively internationalist president who needed to be continually wary of any public perception that he was too busy with "abroad". There is big irony here; it was the Republican right in particular that encouraged isolationist drift but that now finds itself unable, for the time, to convince Americans that it should send their children to fight in the Middle East. Messrs Perle and Wolfowitz would argue that this time it is very different. This is no Bosnia or Rwanda or Somalia, no appeal to humanitarian instincts, but a situation in which the national interests of the US are directly threatened. Why then do a majority of Americans seem unconvinced of the urgency of the situation? Part of the truth is that President Bush has made little attempt to make a compelling case for war. More specifically he has failed to link 11 September and the horror it represented with Saddam Hussein. People want to know just how Iraq threatens their home town. There was an assumption that in the climate of moral outrage that followed 11 September, Mr Bush's long-standing desire to get rid of Saddam would have wide support. Also what appeared to be a relatively uncomplicated victory in Afghanistan emboldened the hawks in the White House. The current crisis in "liberated" Afghanistan should tell Mr Bush that the line between confidence and hubris can be perilously close. I expect that when Mr Bush does present his evidence it will lay out much that we already know. We will be given details of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons capacity. There will be evidence, too, of his attempt to re-launch a nuclear weapons program, and finally – but critically in terms of public opinion – there will be a dossier on Saddam's links to al-Qa'ida. What none of us can tell until we see the information is whether the intelligence is speculative or solid. Even if the intelligence is less than overwhelming in relation to al-Qa'ida, Mr Bush may win grudging backing for his war. But grudging backing is as bad as no backing if the war starts go wrong. The assumption that Saddam's army will simply fold as it did during the last Gulf War may turn out to be wrong-headed. The Iraqi leader never committed his best troops to battle, and when the Allied forces stormed into Kuwait and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm they faced waves of miserable conscripts. The real fighting forces were held back to deal with the internal war against the Shia and the Kurds, who, as Saddam anticipated, rose in rebellion when the regime seemed threatened. During the last Gulf War, Saddam continually underestimated the determination of the Allies to launch an invasion. He did so largely on the basis that he believed the coalition would fall apart as evidence grew of civilian casualties from the air campaign. This time around he will calculate that public opinion in the US and Britain will either forestall an attack, or revolt when the military and civilian cost becomes too high. Saddam may well be willing to allow a war to start in the belief that it will collapse from political pressures well before US armour ever reaches the gates of Baghdad. Thus he has little incentive to cave in now to what are likely to be very tough demands on weapons inspections. If Saddam is convinced that the rest of the world is opposed to war and that the US and Britain are isolated, he will play tough and hope to humiliate Bush before a shot is fired. But it is at this point that American public opinion could swing in behind the President and the countdown to war will have begun. The list of what-ifs that attend any war scenario is scary. Mr Blair senses this more acutely than his American counterpart, if only because he is more inclined to hear the advice of his own diplomats and intelligence people. Thus when he arrives in Camp David today he will surely be asking how Mr Bush proposes to deal with the prospect of large-scale casualties if Saddam's élite forces make a stand in the cities. How will the US respond if Saddam deploys chemical and biological weapons against Allied forces and against the Israelis? And what does he plan to do for Iraq after Saddam is ousted? Iraq is a country of different nations – Sunni, Shia and Kurd – and could easily slide into Yugoslavia-style anarchy. Mr Bush needs to say whether he plans to turn Iraq into an international protectorate with thousands of Allied troops patrolling the area for years into the future. But most of all Mr Bush needs to make a compelling case to his own people, and the rest of the world, for going to war in the first place. So expect to see a big public relations campaign to shock the American people into supporting war, with or without wide international support, and expect a sudden increase in the tempo of American efforts to try and win Arab support by pressing Ariel Sharon to talk to the Palestinians. It's hard to believe there will be any meaningful dialogue, and the best Bush can expect is a lowering of anti-war rhetoric from Arab leaders. Also expect Saddam to give a little but not enough and... expect war this winter. The writer is a BBC special correspondent © 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd commondreams.org

To: TigerPaw who wrote (6053)	9/12/2002 12:51:14 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

<<...But the administration seems increasingly ready to act alone against Baghdad if it cannot convince the rest of the world that Iraq poses a clear and present danger to its neighbors and to others. Militarily, the US could certainly do so. But unilateral action could cause a diplomatic earthquake that would topple several pillars holding up the edifice of international stability. By attacking Iraq without UN endorsement, Washington would be arrogating to itself the right to decide what constitutes a threat to world peace, and what to do about it. That would be a significant break from international norms. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan underscored Wednesday, only the UN Security Council could provide "the unique legitimacy that one needs to be able to act" against threats to international peace. If the US goes it alone, that "neo-imperial vision," argues Georgetown professor John Ikenberry in the current edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, "could transform today's world order in a way that the end of the cold war ... did not."...>> csmonitor.com