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

To: Rascal who wrote (113214)	8/29/2003 1:52:53 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Rascal; Re: "I think Clark means troops from other countries." Then he should have said so. And my criticism of him would have been accordingly different. I'd say that he was a dreamer, which is just as bad. I'm sorry, but mending those fences with Europe don't mean ship. To properly occupy even a country as peaceful and serene as Northern Ireland with an occupying force as religiously and ethnically similar as Great Britain requires about 500,000 troops in Iraq. Now think about this. The United States, the world's sole superpower, is stretched to cough up 140,000 troops to send to Iraq. How the hell are we going to get Europe to send the missing 330,000? Europe ain't big enough to provide the troops. It's a classic hopeless situation, and there is no conceivable collection of foreign countries that could come to the party and pull our chestnuts out of the fire. It just can't be done. Furthermore, the very hopelessness of the numbers required means that few countries will be willing to send anything more than token contingents. Sure we might get France or Germany to send 20,000 troops each, (which I would be amazed at, and would require some sort of incredible persuasion), but that just doesn't make a dent in the actual numbers required. More likely is that they would send a few thousand, at most, and those would be from units that needed to get more combat experience for training purposes. -- Carl

To: Rascal who wrote (113214)	8/29/2003 5:40:56 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Deepening Doubts on Iraq _______________________________ Lead Editorial The Los Angeles Times August 29, 2003 Where are the weapons of mass destruction? As President Bush and other administration officials made the case for war with Iraq, their biggest selling point was the claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime possessed chemical weapons. Allegations he had biological weapons were shakier; assertions he had nuclear arms or could build them were even more dubious. There were other ever-shifting official rationales for the Iraq invasion, like Hussein's torture and killing of his own people and promoting Mideast democracy through his ouster. The main justification, however, for sending Americans to die in the desert was Hussein's earlier use of chemical weapons, his continued possession of them and the imminent threat he would inflict them on the United States. In this year's State of the Union speech, Bush cited United Nations reports or U.S. intelligence that showed that Hussein had failed to account for 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin, mustard agent and VX nerve agent. "From three Iraqi defectors, we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapon labs designed to produce germ warfare agents," Bush said. Where are those chemicals, those poisons or those labs? Times staff writer Bob Drogin reported Thursday the deeply disturbing news that U.S. intelligence officials were now laboring to learn whether they had been fed false information about Iraq's weapons, especially by defectors. U.N. inspectors' prewar searches found no chemical, biological or nuclear stockpiles. Hundreds of inspectors combing Iraq since major combat ended May 1 have fared no better. One U.S. intelligence official says analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support White House claims about Iraqi arms. Intelligence and congressional sources told Times reporters in October, five months before the invasion, that senior Bush officials were pressuring CIA analysts to shape their assessments of the threat to build the case against Hussein. On the eve of war, this editorial page said Iraq should be given more time to disarm, otherwise the U.S. "risks being branded as the aggressive and arrogant superpower that disregards the wishes of the international community." The United States now wears that label, especially in light of the administration's vacillations on involving other nations' forces in postwar Iraq. But worse is the possibility that nearly 300 American personnel and dozens of British soldiers, plus U.N. officials and untold numbers of Iraqis, have died due to incredibly bad or corrupted intelligence. In Britain, a Sunday Telegraph poll showed that 67% of the public thought that their government, the main U.S. ally, had deceived the British people to get them into Iraq. The war was more popular in the U.S. But Bush, administration officials, intelligence analysts and Congress need to keep asking: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? And if they are not found, was the defiant U.S. insistence that Iraq had them the result of incompetence or lies? latimes.com