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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (5640)	11/25/2002 12:43:00 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

Saddam likes to be unanticipated. He likes to fool other people. He's a control freak. The actual people who count in that country are now down to about a dozen. All control is in a skinny spike at the top of the pyramid. He is surrounded by sycophants. He would become great and it would be unanticipated if he acquiesced. He has visions of being the next Saladin. The great pan-Arab leader. Giving up the weapons doesn't fit with the vision. His model of government is stalinist. That doesn't fit with giving up the weapons. He has the profile of a psychopath and they are given both to grandiosity and and impulsiveness. So it's possible but not probable he will really acquiesce. It's most likely he will cheat, calculating the inspections will have ambiguous results and he can then say he's complied and it's time to lift the sanctions and no fly zones. (This will go over with some of the peace at any price crowd. But the weapons will still be there and the Iraqi people will continue being tyrannized). That's what he implied in his recent interview. He said time is on his side. Ref: memri.org I don't put a lot of store in this because he's a liar but stalling goes with past behaviour. I think he may be wrong. The US has not yet finished all the preliminary work for an invasion: it has not finished putting together it's coalition; as far as I know it has not finalized arrangements with Turkey (very necessary); reserves have not been called up; there has been little public discussion of what US plans are for Iraq at the end of the invasion. A successful invasion of Iraq (one with minimum loss of life of Iraqis and invaders and minimum physical damage) will require a fast moving army of at least 200,000. But the US has put a lot of preliminary men and materiel into the area and is rotating forces through. A huge invasion force could be placed in a couple of months. It appears the Bush administration is planning for both the long and short term. _____________________________________ The war which has been going on since well before 9/11/01 is between modernity and antiquity. It can be summarized paradigmatically as between those who believe in the rightness of rulers and faith, and those who believe in the rightness of democracy and science. Saddam Hussein, like most of the political heads in the Middle East, is a ruler and part of the reacting archaic forces. Modernity has no place for stalinist regimes and their prisons, torture and genocide. The Iraq regime is a vicious reproach to us. That the West has let it go on so long is seen in the ME as evidence of our hypocrisy and has led to quite a lot of bad feeling - democracy and prosperity are OK for us, but tyranny and poverty are good enough for them. It's time for a clear message. The WMDs are a proximate reason for invasion, but what the Iraqi regime is and does is a sufficiently good reason in itself. A sincere effort by US and its allies to promote democracy in Iraq even if it fails, will bring respect to the US and great comfort to modern people living in the area. I think Bush understands the large situation intuitively and that's why he's been trying to get the modern countries to stand up for what they are. That's why he said he had a mission to bring democracy to the Middle East. Similarly with his address to the UN in September: as the leader of the leading exemplar of modernity he told the UN it had to commit to it's modern structure or be irrelevant. The Soviets are gone. There is no need anymore to acquiesce to the existence of totalitarian regimes with their gulags and genocide, all contrary to the many resolutions both the Security Counsel and General Assembly has made. There is too much complacency on the part of many folk living in modern countries that because modernity has been ascendant the last couple of centuries that it will remain ascendant. The muslim civilization of about a thousand years ago was the leading modern power of its time with some freedom and science and it was destroyed by archaic forces from within and from outside.