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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Land Shark who wrote (430614)	7/21/2003 9:06:42 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

If dems controlled congress - impeachment time. And much more well-deserved than with Clinton.

To: Land Shark who wrote (430614)	7/21/2003 9:43:01 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

OP-ED COLUMNIST Saddam's Guerrillas By WILLIAM SAFIRE ASHINGTON Saddam Hussein is waging "a classical guerrilla-type campaign," says Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command, which is "getting more organized" every day. What can the deposed dictator hope to accomplish? How can he, with a ragtag force of Baathist criminals and imported killers with nothing to lose, possibly defeat 170,000 occupying troops? Saddam outfoxed one President Bush and intends to outfox and outlast another. Facing the likelihood that his army would disintegrate under direct assault, he probably decided that the mother of all battles against a democracy is a war of attrition. We may assume his current strategy to be based on some of these assumptions: 1. Troop losses drove Clinton out of Somalia, Eisenhower out of Lebanon, Johnson and Nixon out of Vietnam. In occupied Iraq, only one death a day — sustained for months with pictures of bereaved families on television — would, in Saddam's thinking, not only demoralize the occupiers but also increase political pressure in the U.S. and Britain to bring the troops home. 2. European and Muslim opinion, incensed at being ignored by a superpower, will continue to deny cooperation to the victors. Saddam assumes this would force Bush to turn over control of Iraq to the U.N., in which Kofi Annan has just said "democracy should not be imposed from the outside," and the blue helmets would run at the first Sunni uprising. 3. Patience is not an American virtue. Saddam anticipates that the antiwar minority — furious at the unexpected ease of the U.S. victory and shrugging off findings of mass graves of Saddam's victims — would turn a steady accretion of casualties among occupiers into dread visions of "quagmire." 4. Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam. 5. He presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate. 6. Inside Iraq, with the Americans on the way out, the Shiite majority would split, and when the Sunni minority seizes power in Baghdad the troublesome Kurds would separate, thereby triggering a Turkish invasion of the north. In the ensuing anarchy, the strongman would emerge out of internal exile to exterminate the disloyal and lead the Arab world. That's his comeback strategy. Is it a homicidal maniac's dream? If the taped voice is Saddam's, as we believe, it means he has worked out a means of secret production and clandestine transmission to cooperative broadcasters just as cunning as the concealment of damning documents or recent traffic across borders of money and terrorist helpers. How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us? Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed. Put sacrifice in perspective. The loss of one soldier's life is individual tragedy, but the loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator would be national tragedy. The purpose of our armed forces is to protect us and that's the costly mission our volunteers carry out every day. Remember which nations had the courage to do right in timely fashion. Dissenters are free to argue about judgments of hard-to-read intelligence, but few will deny that the world is indisputably safer with the overthrow of a proven mass murderer and financier of suicide bombers. This above all: to end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam Hussein and his ghostly crew. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.