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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (53332)	10/20/2002 1:44:43 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I fear Al Qaeda MUCH MORE than Saddam...Bin Laden & Co. will only get stronger and strike more effectively if we invade Iraq...He wants us to get distracted.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (53332)	10/20/2002 9:57:49 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

My worries line up behind Ken Pollack's -- that the adminstration doesn't have the foresight or stomach for occupation and nation-building in Iraq. In a macabre way, I have to fear that the war in Iraq will be too easy -- without an investment of blood, the Americans won't want to stay and clean up the mess. Nonetheless, better a war now than letting Saddam, or even worse, Uday, get their hands on nukes. I live in fear of seeing a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or Washington DC. Good points. One of the directions, however, my thinking is going right now is a bit different. The North Korean bit, coupled with the always persistent worry of what happens if Islamist parties in Pakistan get stronger or manage a successful palace coup, is the problem of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This administration has canned the only policy out there--of trying to limit the dispersion of the Russian nukes and the skills that went along with it and, so far as I can tell, has no serious policy to replace it. I don't think invading every country (with policies we don't approve of) that either has nukes or announces plans to have them or can be detected as trying to do so, is a serious policy. That international problem along with reducing the Al Q type threats strikes me as more important than an Iraqi invasion.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (53332)	10/20/2002 6:37:58 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

What's with the current Uday revival? Given all the people flogging it in the past few days, I got to assume this is a propaganda line du jour or something. From Bowden's account in the Atlantic last spring: Saddam tolerated Uday's excesses—his drunken parties, his private jail in the Olympic Committee headquarters—until Uday murdered one of the Great Uncle's top aides at a party in 1988. Uday immediately tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. According to the Cockburns, "As his stomach was being pumped out, Saddam arrived in the emergency room, pushed the doctors aside, and hit Uday in the face, shouting: 'Your blood will flow like my friend's!'" His father softened, and the murder was ruled an accident. Uday spent four months in custody and then four months with an uncle in Geneva before he was picked up by the Swiss police for carrying a concealed weapon and asked to leave the country. Back in Baghdad, in 1996, he became the target of an assassination attempt. He was hit by eight bullets, and is now paralyzed from the waist down. His behavior has presumably disqualified him from succeeding his father. Saddam has made a show in recent years of grooming Qusay, a quieter, more disciplined and dutiful heir. theatlantic.com Then there's the utterly shameless nuclear scaremongering, ironic in the face of the Korean news from last week, but that's another story.