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

To: frankw1900 who wrote (75431)	2/19/2003 1:48:01 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I just listened to the Debate between Hitchens and Berkeley J-School Professor Mark Danner on the topic of America's role in Iraq. It was held at Berkeley at a University Hall on Jan 29th, roughly 30 minutes after Bush's "State of the Union" address. It is one hour and forty minutes long, and took about 7 minutes to load by "Roadrunner" on Realplayer. It was just outstanding, and I highly recommend it to all. Hitchens was even better in a Debate format than in written form. Danner held his own. Not as eloquent, but made his points well. The audience was 80% pro-Danner, and had to be restrained at times from heckling Hitchens, but he took it in stride. Hey, it's Berkeley! Ya shudda been there, FL. I made some notes on what Hitchens said, and they are below, followed by the URL. Hey, make your own Danner notes! :>) We are already at war. The no-fly zones were never ok'd by the UN. Ansar al-Islam, trained by and lined up ideologically with Al Qaeda, is fighting the Kurds alongside Saddam The Kurdish north shows you a picture of what regime change can be like. 21 Newspapers, a parliament with several parties, some measure of prosperity, in an area that was the most beaten up and repressed in the ME. The Utopian position is the one that thinks things can go on as they are in Iraq. Saddam's burning of the Quwait Oil fields and continued attempts to develope WMD in the face of sanctions shows that he is round the bend and must be stopped. Saddams worst crimes were committed when he was a client of the US, and that was "Blood for Oil" and that is when you people should have put your silly placards up. If I was a Kurd or Iraqi I would be offended by the idea that I needed someone to run my life with a long occupation. The success of the Kurdish area, in spite of enormous difficulty, shows that these people are capable of running their own lifes. To wait for Iraq to break up by itself instead of occupying and making a stable transition available is asking for an state of Anarchy to possibly develop on top of 20% of the worlds oil supply. Chirac is a pimp who sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam, and Hitchens is happy to see the Germans as pacifists. May they stay that way. webcast.berkeley.edu

To: frankw1900 who wrote (75431)	2/19/2003 4:19:36 AM
From: Bill Ulrich	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

re: Iraqi marshes/floods. "Desert War" not so dry: Flooding Could Be An Iraqi Weapon Miami Herald February 16, 2003 Lt. Matthew K. Massey, a U.S. Marine Corps combat engineer, says he almost laughs when he hears talk about a "desert war" with Iraq. "Maybe it will be more like a water war," he said. Massey knows that American ground troops attacking Baghdad from Kuwait will have to cross the mighty Euphrates and Tigris rivers, the muddy Mesopotamia region between them plus a vast latticework of irrigation canals and farm paddies that Iraqi troops can flood at will. President Saddam Hussein could also blow up three dams around Baghdad and send a wall of water rushing down the southern approaches to his capital city, where he has entrenched elite troops for a final stand. "If he lets loose with those he can really slow us down and create some problems," said Lt. Cmdr. Pat Garin, 39, of Albuquerque, N.M., executive officer of the Navy Seabees' 74th Mobile Construction Battalion. <SNIP> `WAR OF THE PUMPS' More recently, Iraq and Iran flooded and drained fields to their own advantage on the southern front of their war in the 1980s, in what one Western diplomat at the time called "the War of the Pumps." At the start of the war in 1980, Iraq created Fish Lake, a shallow moat totaling 300 square miles and designed to block an Iranian ground attack against the city of Basra, 28 miles north of the border with Kuwait. Iraqi troops retreating from a 1986 Iranian attack on the nearby Faw peninsula pumped water into the area's grid of salt evaporation flats to slow the attackers, and the Iranians opened sluices to drain them. In recent years, Hussein has also drained the Hawize marshes that straddle the Iraq-Iran border north of Basra, home to Shiite Muslims who have long fought against Iraq's predominantly Sunni Muslim regime. (MORE...):http://www.military.com/NewsContent?file=FL_flood_021703