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

To: KLP who wrote (46136)	9/22/2002 11:49:47 AM
From: SirRealist	Respond to of 281500

The problem is, KLP, that Hussein has viewed us as the enemy for at least 11 years. Let's assume he's had them throughout. Seen any here? There? Anywhere? There's nothing new about nukes. Growing up in their shadow was fearful... and expensive. When the USSR fell, the economy ended a long period of mostly stagnation and we had a growth period, albeit an excessive one. Yet I was fully aware that the USSR breakup meant roughly the same # of warheads (since reduced) but in more hands. I was hardly reassured. Now the nuclear genie is being raised to invoke fear and more wasteful spending. I'm no more fearful of Hussein with nukes than I was with Kruschev, Mao or Musharraf. He's every bit as dangerous as to his own people as was the Shah of Iran, and much less dangerous than Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc. The US has been targeted, on this soil, by Al Qaeda, several times. There's not much evidence of all the other madmen of the world hitting our shores in the past century because they knew what the results would be. Al Qaida is the proven fruitcake; let's pound them into non-being. There remains no evidence that Iraq intends to attack the US, whether he has a peashooter or a giant invisible death ray. We were warned? Yeah, I've been warned by experts about pending doom hundreds of times. On 9/11, they were right for the second time. I'll go with the odds/

To: KLP who wrote (46136)	9/22/2002 12:02:02 PM
From: aladin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

KLP, If nukes happen, we are all toast. Don't be ridiculous. The world won't end, the sky won't fall and the ozone layer won't implode if Saddam or anyone uses a nuke in the ME. We are not talking about the Soviet Union vs USA circa the cold war. At most maybe 600 tactical weapons held by all parties in the ME theatre. The noble EU (via France) has open-air tested more mega-tonnage over the last 30 years by itself. Worst case scenario: At most one or two western targets (probably NY and London or Washington) hit with suitcase or ship bombs. Or a bio strike on US/UK of similar magnitude. Again worst case would be 6-8 million dead here (then the gloves of civilization come off and the ME and other terror states ARE wiped-out). More likely scenario: Regional nuke war with Israel nuking most of the Arab world into the stone age in retaliation for an Iraqi bio or nuke strike on Israel. Most likely scenario: Saddam takes a powder and there is no war at all (or gets shot by one of his own looking over their 'future'). John