Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: PartyTime who wrote (8635)	2/15/2003 6:17:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 25898

U.S. must prepare for war that might not go according to plan BY ANDREW GREELEY Columnist The Chicago Sun-Times February 14, 2003 These last two weeks Americans have suffered spasms of grief over the death of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia. Few understood--or cared--that the ultimate reason for their deaths is the same as that of the deaths of the crew of Challenger. As sociologist Diane Vaughan argued in her magisterial book on the earlier disaster, the Congress and president have tried consistently through the years to run a low-budget space program. Either the country should end the program or give it the money necessary for a program that is both successful and safe. Yet there is an irony in the national grief over the deaths of seven brave astronauts against the background of preparation for a war in which thousands of brave Americans may suffer horrible deaths from poison gas or disease in the deserts of Iraq. In its initial assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the CIA said he was unlikely to use them unless he was attacked. Therefore, we prepare to attack him. If he does have the capacity to use such weapons, as our swashbuckling president argues, then he will surely use them against our forces in the desert. Why not? He has nothing to lose. Almost certainly he will try to use these weapons against Israel, too. The Israelis will probably respond by using an atom bomb to obliterate Baghdad. Such an attack will unleash all the furies of war in the Middle East. Again, if he has nothing to lose, the Iraqi dictator may well do exactly what we are invading to avoid: He might turn over his anthrax and smallpox germs to al-Qaida. Thus, an invasion of Iraq may accomplish just those fearsome tragedies that it is designed to prevent. Saddam may well die, but he'll die convinced that history will hail him as the greatest Islamic leader since Salladin. Why don't the brilliant chicken hawk thinkers in the administration take these terrible possibilities into account? One thing seems certain: Americans will have many, many more people to mourn. These disasters, please God, might not happen. But they might. What will those Americans do who mourned the Columbia tragedy yet were silent as young men and women were shipped off to horrible deaths? Most likely they will stand around and sing ''God Bless America''! The United States will doubtless win the war. I hope that it wins in something closer to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's six days than six weeks--not to say six months. A short war will mean fewer deaths, of both Americans and Iraqis. It might also mean that there will be no time for attacks on Tel Aviv. Yet I have little confidence in the Pentagon's ability to win quickly and efficiently. The Army has notoriously been inefficient in such situations (consider the Apache helicopters in Kosovo). How long will it take the forces we are rushing in to Turkey to gather together their logistics, plan an attack, and then pour into northern Iraq? More likely they will just rush in, hoping with the help of the local Kurds to sweep away all resistance and to seize the precious oil fields of Mosul for the American oil companies before Saddam can set them on fire. Maybe they'll be lucky; maybe resistance will collapse quickly. Maybe. Yet such a slapdash campaign would invite a catastrophe if there are enough Iraqis prepared to fight. If there is one lesson we can learn from military history, it's that the best-laid plans of even the most powerful armies and most brilliant generals quickly go awry when the battle begins. Napoleon had Waterloo all figured out. Yet he ended up running back to Paris. I can't imagine the relatively small force we are sending into Iraq (three Army divisions, two Marine ''expeditionary forces'') turning tail and running. I hope that does not happen because it would cause so many more deaths. Yet war is always chaotic and unpredictable--not the easy, well-ordered, planned ballet that the president and the defense secretary and the chicken hawks seem to think. I wish they were less confident and more aware of everything that could go wrong. suntimes.com

To: PartyTime who wrote (8635)	2/15/2003 6:32:48 PM
From: AK2004	Respond to of 25898

PT his interpretation was very accurate and written too <ggggg> I consider myself as very moderate and yet, in spite of all that I have read, I support this war. The war would cause the death among Iraqis and among allies yet one should consider the alternative as well. The alternative is Sadam with ties to various terrorist organizations with good supply of chemical and bacteriological weapons and who proved to be more than willing to use them too. We played a "mutually assured destruction" game with soviet union but I am not willing to do the same with Sadam