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

To: carranza2 who wrote (53246)	10/19/2002 5:41:58 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

And Stalin, though not a poster boy for mental health, was not an adventurer. Neither were his successors. The analogy is flawed and ultimately silly. Saddam, on the other hand, is an inveterate maximalist who has proven time and time again that he has no conception of limits. Also, those who say that Saddam is deterable always list two of his top priorities: survival and regional dominance. They forget the third top priority: revenge on his enemies. This leads to some calculations quite different from Stalin's or the other leaders of the USSR. From everything I understand about a tribal Arab leader's mentality -- which Saddam by all accounts has -- revenge is no mere luxury, but an absolute necessity for survival of the clan. Remember the story of the old man and the turkey! Furthermore, Saddam has miscalculated wildly in the past, since he doesn't understand non-Arab politics. Add to the picture the fact that any Stalin-type autocrat makes all his decisions thinking he is much stronger than he really is, since no one likes to give the boss bad news, and it's really anybody's guess what Saddam will do next.