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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (65836)	1/13/2003 7:30:24 PM
From: ThirdEye	Respond to of 281500

If I was Osama, I'd be sitting back and letting W pound the table, let the tanks roll into Iraq, wait for Great Leader in Pyongyang to immediately step up the rhetoric, wait for a few allies to get cold feet about the whole thing, then when the military is stretched, the foreign policy apparatus is stretched, the body bags are coming home, Congress at loggerheads, strike a refinery somedamnwhere with a dirty bomb. Stop World War W.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (65836)	1/13/2003 10:26:13 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi stockman_scott; Re the article "The Unreality of Imminent War". There was an interesting paragraph I thought I'd comment on: Stephen Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes has a theory, "Either they [the administration] don't have a card to play [to prove Saddam has weapons of mass destruction in order to win public opinion and Security Council support], so they're trying to create a sense of momentum or inevitability with all these deployments - in which case there's no evidence that it's working. Or, they do have a big card to play and they're waiting for the right moment to play it." atimes.com I can imagine why the administration might keep a smoking gun secret until the last minute, if they had one, but in fact, the administration itself has implied that they don't have one. They've been saying this for months: Seeing a Smoking Gun Means It's Too Late, Rumsfeld Says Donald Rumsfeld, DefenseLINK, September 18, 2002 defenselink.mil Rumsfeld: No World War III in Iraq Donald Rumsfeld, CNN, November 15, 2002 "Our task, your task ... is to try to connect the dots before something happens. People say, 'Well, where's the smoking gun?' Well, we don't want to see a smoking gun from a weapon of mass destruction," he told the caller, a mother whose son has completed training in the Army and may soon be sent overseas. cnn.com If they had a smoking gun, they'd be talking up the fact that they were going to eventually produce it. Instead, their whole talking points have been that no smoking gun is necessary. Unfortunately for Bush, the rest of the world ain't buying it. What a fiasco. -- Carl