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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (67201)	12/20/2002 8:43:27 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Skin. Hopefully over the next 40 days iraqi patriots may take the future of the country in their hands and put an end to Saddam. Of course this would come most probably from the military who after all have enforced saddams war crimes and developed his WMDs. No easy answers as the clock ticks. As an aside if you were president and saddam approached you diplomatically and offered to trade you all wmds for his continued iron fisted rule plus all sanctions removed and oil turned on, what would you do? What an outcry from zonder et al then about how cynical american foreign policy sold out iraqi people, ignoring the tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been saved. So what would you do? I have answered that i would cut the deal but since i said that i have joined the NOT SURE camp. After reviewing american foreign policy since WW2 i find that when it is based on pure national interest without taking our ideals into account, it leads to future greater problems. mike

To: skinowski who wrote (67201)	12/22/2002 4:24:33 PM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Granted that I do not like Saddam one bit, let me take apart your argument re "For one man – an absolute dictator – to have such power is unacceptable" The best way to refute a statement is to find a counter-example and I have one ready for you: Musharraf is a dictator and Pakistan has nukes. US supports Musharraf and you do not seem to have a problem with him having control to "such power". Thus your distaste re Saddam has nothing to do with him being a dictator who has yet unproven WMDs. QED. <g> In case you have an objection like "He is not a dictator": time.com Now, on to your other point, re "if (IF) he does have WMD’s which he could use in different parts of the world, he may use them." I do not know if you are familiar with Game Theory, but when posed as a problem for this discipline, your solution is rather absurd: A guy has WMDs. We do not want him to use them. What do we do? One of the choices, the worst one, is to invade his country and make sure he knows that there is no way he will survive this attack, in which case, it is almost certain that he will use the alleged WMDs. So either he does not have WMDs and so the US has no reason to invade Iraq, or he has WMDs that he does not seem to have any intention of using but he very probably will if invaded. What if he loses his marbles? Or, gets terminal cancer and doesn’t care anymore? That is not a very strong argument, you know. And I might get hit by a car tomorrow. Whatever. The fact is that he has not shown any aggression towards any of his neighbours in the past decade. Besides, now that W. Bush has the same power, to declare war on or invade another country without asking anyone, one might ask the same questions towards for his rule. While I share your distaste for Saddam and his rule, I am not convinced that invading Iraq is a solution for a "win" outcome.