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Strategies & Market Trends : Strictly: Drilling II -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SliderOnTheBlack who wrote (21658)	11/11/2002 10:21:19 AM
From: re3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36161

slider, my post was a bit of a put-on...one bit of american history that needs to be emphasized is august 15th, 1971...famous last words from D.Bowie, "do you remember your President Nixon, do you remember the bills you had to pay, only yesterday."

To: SliderOnTheBlack who wrote (21658)	11/11/2002 10:22:36 AM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36161

Slider, I agree that war is almost inevitable and that the price of gold will go up, either because of war or because of the decline in the value of the dollar relative to other hard currencies. But there are other consequences that your comments don't address: The Iraqis are too smart to allow a ground war in open areas. They'll force the U.S. military to come after them in the city streets, where sniper attacks will decimate our forces. The key officials will set up their offices in mosques, especially in the Grand Mosque of Baghdad, which is considered one of the oldest and holiest of Muslim shrines. Any attempt to deface the mosque or even enter it would raise not only stiff resistance by the Iraqis but the enmity of 1.2 billion Muslims around the world. There's no better way to ENCOURAGE Muslim terrorists than to destroy mosques or even enter them. How would you like it if an army decided to take over the Church of St. John the Divine in NY? So the cost of any war will be far higher than the Administration has led people to believe--higher because of the inevitable deaths from sniper attacks, and also from booby traps containing poison gas or deadly virus, which Iraq claims not to have. One assumption that policymakers get wrong time after time is that the Iraq leaders would never use the kind of force that would kill their own people. Oh yeah? They've done it before and they'll do it again. War is just the wrong way to dump Saddam. By far the easier and cheaper way is to provide about $1 billion aid to each of the surrounding countries, including Iran and Syria. Money talks in this part of the world, and it's cheaper than launching a full scale military onslaught where our own forces would be caught in urban alleys that are not conducive to the kinds of training they have had. If you think this is a lot of nonsense, let me remind you that I've spent more than seven years working in Muslim countries, including in the Middle East, and I also majored in Arabic language and history at the Univ. of Michigan. In any event, a war will be good for gold bugs. Art Bechhoefer