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

To: Ilaine who wrote (49021)	10/2/2002 9:33:05 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Jonah Golderg's column of anti-anti-war arguments was so popular he wrote a seqel today. Excerpt: THERE IS NO LINK BETWEEN AL QAEDA AND IRAQ This is a similar argument to the above in that it once again uses al Qaeda as the cudgel to beat back any other conflict. The implication is that if Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 assault (still an "if," by the way) then attacking Iraq makes as much sense as attacking Belize. To the extent this is a sincere argument — it surely isn't most of the time — it represents a profound failure of the imagination. When terrible things happen, politicians and pundits say things like "something like this must never happen again," and the rest of us nod a lot. After 9/11 the near-unanimous consensus was that America should do everything it could to prevent something similar from happening ever again. Now, if you believe that al Qaeda, and only al Qaeda, is capable of committing such a crime ever again, you are on safe intellectual ground. But no reasonable person actually believes this. If a scorpion sneaks into your house and bites your child, you kill the scorpion. That's a no-brainer. But if you believe "something like this must never happen again" then you also go out in the yard and kill the other scorpions. You also kill rattlesnakes and black widow spiders, and maybe you even get a new alarm system and a child safety seat for your car. In other words, you do every reasonable thing you can. Imagine telling your wife, "Honey, I know there's that huge scorpion nest out in the yard, but I killed the scorpion responsible. Can you prove that the other scorpions had anything to do with the one that bit little Timmy?" Right now the intelligence community is being raked over the coals for failing to "connect the dots" leading to September 11. Fair enough. Does anyone honestly believe that if Saddam Hussein orchestrated an attack on the US tomorrow or next year we wouldn't look back in retrospect and say, "Why didn't we connect the dots?" After all, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle called for regime change in 1998. The dots are there. They do not constitute the only argument for toppling Saddam, but if you subscribe to the "this must never happen again" argument they should be enough. ...So: Is Iraq a brutal totalitarian regime? Check! Is it a proven threat to its neighbors? Check! Is it a proven threat to its own people? Check! Is it a proven threat to our allies? Check! Is it willing to export terrorism abroad? Check! Is it likely that if it got weapons of mass destruction, it would use them recklessly? Check! Is it working very hard to get weapons of mass destruction? Check! Would Saddam's people be better off without him? Check! Would we and our allies be better off without him? Check! Do we have the power and capabilities to get rid of him without paying too high a cost? Check! And, would getting rid of him make it less likely that another September 11 would "happen again"? Check. http://www.siliconinvestor.com/msg_reply.gsp

To: Ilaine who wrote (49021)	10/2/2002 9:52:28 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "Tell that to the 2 million Cambodians killed on the killing fields by Pol Pot's fiends." The US should have intervened to prevent that horrible event in Cambodia. If we'd gone in, the people would have welcomed our troops with cheers. Instead, we ignored it. Why? Because we'd already gotten our fingers burned in Vietnam and the American people were unwilling to go back for more. If all those fools had run the Vietnam conflict correctly (which would have been to cut a deal with the popular figure Ho Chi Minh so as to align him with the US instead of China), the US would have been in position to make a humanitarian move into Cambodia that would still be remembered in the area 100 years from now. We could possibly have influenced Ho Chi Minh to unify the country democratically instead of by military force. That would have contributed to a much earlier softening of his regime. Instead, due to a simplistic foreign policy that assumed that all Communists were equivalent and directed by the USSR, we were in no position to get involved. Our foreign policy was simplistic largely because it was driven by US political concerns. Since any particular US citizen (like any particular citizen of any other randomly chosen country) is unlikely to understand distant foreign situations at much beyond the sound bite level (i.e. stuff like "tell that to the 2 million Cambodians"), the result was that the two parties beat each other over the head with sound bites. My whole point on use of US military resources can be broken down to the simple point of this: We should help countries that are aggressed by other countries (like Kuwait was attacked by Iraq). We should help eliminate regimes that are hated by their people (like Cambodia or Afghanistan). If we follow my guidelines, every war we get into will result in a foreign population cheering our soldiers (not the agressor population, like Germany in WW2, of course, but the freed populations like France). Instead, we got into Vietnam for theoretical reasons that were described at the sound bite level. It was a f'ing disaster. By the way, if we hadn't already pissed in the Iraq pot, the people there would probably welcome US soldiers there for a liberation from Saddam, and I would be in favor of the attack, just like I was in favor of the attack against the Taliban. -- Carl P.S. I don't know any Vietnamese at the moment. I'm sure that most of the ones in the US appreciate our helping Vietnam, but those are mostly the ones that escaped the Communist regime. The fact of the matter is that it wasn't Chinese Communists that were sniping at and setting up booby traps for our soldiers down there. I also have no doubt that some of the Vietnamese who fought us then have changed their minds since. But so what. This is now, that was then.

To: Ilaine who wrote (49021)	10/2/2002 10:20:51 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Tell that to the 2 million Cambodians killed on the killing fields by Pol Pot's fiends. That's richly appropriate coming from Ms "It's all about peace". Sihanouk was doing a careful tightrope walk keeping Cambodia neutral and out of the war till Nixon and Kissinger came in with their "secret peace plan" and engineered another one of those innumerable coups that put Cambodia in the thick of it. That, and the "secret" bombing. K and N really had it in for Cambodia. "War is Peace" was as good a fit for K and N as it is for you.