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

To: epicure who wrote (104874)	7/12/2003 2:23:29 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

If there were no WMD, and we find there was no threat to the US, or to any other country (aside from possible regional terrorism- which we've been 100% behind at times- depending on the "target"), how was containment failing? Say what? Containment was the policy designed to make Saddam disarm and comply with the terms of the cease-fire. It involved allowing UN inspectors to inspect his disarmament (inspect, not play cat and mouse games) and other conditions of the armistice. Sanctions were put on Iraq prevented the free sale of Iraqi oil in order to force compliance. Saddam threw the inspectors out in 1998 anyway, and the Sanctions regime was completely breaking down, being violated left and right by everybody, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Germany, France, China, you name it, aside from the oil-for-food program loopholes that you could drive a truck through. So if we had to admit that we couldn't keep up sanctions, we would have had to allow them to be lifted at the UN (France & Germany were panting eager to lift them), with no compliance and no inspections. We would just be stuck patrolling the no-fly zones in an effort to keep Saddam from invading Kuwait again, but without the imprimatur of the UN Sanctions, the no-fly zones would have become untenable too - Saddam would have argued, "Hey, I must be in compliance, why else did you lift the sanctions? Stop violating my sovreignty". If the no-fly zones went away, then Saddam would have gassed the Kurds again to regain control of northern Iraq. It's an internal matter, right? So the end result of this scenario: Saddam wins, big-time, and we lose, big-time. Saddam becomes the Great Arab Survivor of the Standoff with the Great Satan, and the Persian Gulf adjusts its attitudes accordingly. You will notice that this whole scenario has nothing to do with the question of whether Saddam was threatening to use WMDs on the US.