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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LTK007 who wrote (3988)	1/27/2003 1:12:22 AM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

Hey, Max! Keep your smile in front of you ... shoulder to the wind ... put the plough down ... smile in the desert and while you're doing all of this, don't forget that the sun shines behind the clouds! Hang in there!!!

To: LTK007 who wrote (3988)	1/27/2003 2:05:14 AM
From: PartyTime	Respond to of 25898

U.N. Timeline Is a Slow, Deliberate One newsday.com By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent January 26, 2003, 1:50 PM EST BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Behind the noise of media "countdowns" and the drumbeats of war, a simple fact about the U.N. arms inspections in Iraq has faded into the background: They've only just begun. Just a fraction of the U.N.-targeted sites have been visited. The inspectors still await a mobile chemical laboratory, are still analyzing early nuclear samples, and have only recently started using helicopters to leapfrog over the Iraqi countryside in their hunt for forbidden weapons of mass destruction. Whatever early "deadlines" others see two months after the weapons experts returned to Baghdad, the countdown envisioned by United Nations inspectors is a slow, deliberate one. The last time around, inspections lasted almost eight years, before Iraq stopped cooperating. The world awaits a report Monday by the chief inspectors to the U.N. Security Council, a summary of findings in the effort to determine whether the Baghdad government has programs for chemical, biological or nuclear arms. But those inspection chiefs stress repeatedly that their work has been preliminary. "We obviously (will) continue our work afterward," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear agency, said of the report. "And we still have a lot of work to do." Working under a succession of U.N. resolutions, the arms monitors are expected to formally lay out specific disarmament tasks for Iraq in late March and four months later to report whether the Iraqis have fully complied. If Iraq was found in compliance, the council would consider lifting international economic sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. If it fell short -- which seems likely in view of the complexity of the job ahead -- the process assumes the U.N. oversight would go on. Some figures and facts show the preliminary nature of the work thus far: * The chief inspectors report that of 700 or 800 sites of interest to them, their teams had inspected 215 as of Jan. 7. * It took weeks to assemble a U.N. fleet of eight helicopters. The first of their lightning inspections took place only three weeks ago. The helicopters will also enable U.N. monitors to do airborne sampling for radioactive isotopes or other signs of banned weapons production. * The experts are awaiting a modular chemical laboratory and better biological analytical tools to improve their detection capability. * ElBaradei's nuclear agency is still analyzing samples from early inspections and expects to be doing analyses "for the next months," its lab chief said. The U.N. agencies envision possibly taking a year to complete inspections. In the 1990s, a previous inspection agency worked for eight years to find and dismantle such weapons programs, but those teams encountered daily Iraqi obstruction and hostility. The new inspectors, on the other hand, report general Iraqi cooperation on their daily rounds, although the Bush administration accuses Baghdad of noncooperation because it hasn't handed over weapons that Washington, without offering proof, contends it has. As set out by Security Council resolution, after the current inspection phase, the United Nations would monitor Iraq long-term and keep regular watch over its military-industrial establishment. But in a new assessment of the inspections thus far, nonproliferation researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington argue the net that U.N. inspectors are throwing over Iraq has put President Saddam Hussein "in an iron box." "While there may be legitimate concerns about the ability of the inspection regime to discover hidden caches of weapons, there should be no doubt about its ability to prevent militarily significant industrial production," the Carnegie report said. Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

To: LTK007 who wrote (3988)	1/27/2003 6:02:55 AM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

One of the reasons I am so strongly opposed to the course of empire is that will hasten the destruction of this society and what is left of our liberties. Although I do sound anti-American at times, I really am not. I see the US as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde nation. On the positive side the US has enormous accomplishments to its credit in virtually every field of human endeavor. This nation has indeed provided more people with a higher standard of living than any country in history. But it also has a VERY dark side that includes slavery, the near-extermination of the Indians, brutal colonial wars like Vietnam and now possibly Iraq. Plus the deliberate targeting of civilians during wartime in Japan, Germany, southeast Asia, and Iraq. Not to speak of hundreds of thousands killed by CIA supported death squads in places like Indonesia during the 1960s and central America in the 1980s. In the immortal novel "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde" depicting a battle between good and evil for one man's soul -- the evil side won out in the end leading to the death of the subject. I would hate to see the US follow such a path.