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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4506)	2/16/2003 2:23:07 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

Maybe, but parallels and projections by themselves don't justify a war. The world is too complex and no one can predict the future. The problem is, the future doesn't come with an owner's manual. You have to do the best you can. I think most people now would agree that if the world had stopped Germany rearming, and enforced those conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, it would have been a good thing for the world. But people then didn't have the benefit of hindsight, they decided to be cautions and try diplomacy as the solution. Is today a parallel? Problem is, we have to guess. We can't know until after it happens. But assume we don't act. Assume we let another month, or two, or three of inspections go by. By that point, we won't physicall be able to mount an attack until the fall. And we can't keep troops and fleets there on station forever. We have to withdraw for the summer. So Saddam realizes that his stalling tactics have worked yet again. And of course, it's impossible for 100, 200, 300, or however many inspectors to truly inspect a country the size of Iraq and find things they don't want found. Heck, with tens or hundreds of thousands of federal and state and local police and agents running around and with government cooperating with the good guys instead of being the bad guy there's still a ton of illegal stuff going on we can't uncover -- meth labs and marijuna growing operations and all that. Suppose you had 100 people and told them to go to Texas and find any meth labs, but the government had had ten years to hide those and was doing their best to make sure you didn't find them. Do you really think those 100 people would find a single meth lab? The whole concept is silly. So suppose we pull back, and Saddam sees that the world won't support an invasion, and things go on for another five years and suddenly he announces that he has six unclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them to European cities, and he invades Kuwait again and says if anybody interferes he's going to nuke Paris and London and Berlin and Rome. Then people will look back and say "Damn the US, why didn't they invade and stop him when they had the chance?" Will this happen? I don't know. You don't know. Would Saddam act this way if he had the ability to? Given his history, I would bet on it. Is it better to stop him before he gets the chance, or risk the possibility and have the world pay an enormous price of we guessed wrong? That's the key question here. IMO. Do we know? No. We have to make the best educated guess we can. That's all we can do. But I think we will live with a lot of regret, and so will the world, if we don't act and it turns out to be a horrible mistake not to have.

To: Lane3 who wrote (4506)	2/18/2003 6:52:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7720

I agree with you. I think that the UN has a sound basis for blowing Saddam to smithereens. But, corrupt or not, that's their decision, not ours. If we go it alone, it has be because of the threat to us. IMO, of course. I think a reasonable argument against going it alone can be made, but I don't think that it can be right for the UN to do it and wrong for us. The UN is just a forum for nations to argue in, or a framework for them to cooperate within. It has more members then say NATO or the EC but isn't any more an authrority over the world then they are. In the case of a security council resolution you are talking about 5 nations agreeing (the countries with Vetos) and just 3 out of the other ten countries going along. The votes of 8 nations doesn't represent a decision "of the world" or of a legitimate authority over the world in my opinion. Tim