Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (14823)	11/2/2003 2:46:07 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

Several of our allies are filling mass graves even as we speak. We don't invade them, or even put significant pressure on them to stop. It seems that these things only matter when it is convenient to invoke them in support of decisions already reached on other grounds. US power is limited, and US political capital is more limited still. So since we cannot do everything, should we do nothing? If we cannot go in on pure altrustic grounds, should we sit on our hands? That seems to be your argument at bottom. I'm not saying the mass graves were a sufficient reason, or even a necessary one - but they were a reason. Probably a very unpleasant effect, but since I never proposed such a course of action, or anything remotely akin to it, I fail to see why I should defend it. That's one of the shakier straw men I've seen around these parts On the contrary, it was the course of least resistance. Containment was seriously failing. Sanctions were being sabotaged left and right, by France, Russia, Turkey, and Syria. France was campaigning hard to get sanctions lifted (TotalFinaElf would have made millions - follow the money), so the US was being forced to run ever harder and pay ever more just to stay in place, and it wasn't a good place - the US was being pounded by Iraqi dead-baby propaganda all over the Arab world, and by the lot of anti-American Euro leftists, too. This is not to mention what missions the terrorist graduates of Salman Pak might have gone onto. A very serious consideration post 9/11. So the US was stuck in a course of ever increasing costs for diminishing returns. It is more than likely that down the road, sanctions would have been lifted, if Saddam could stage another crisis & win as he did in 1998. This is not my argument, btw, it is Ken Pollack's. That is why he considers the Iraq war a least-bad option. Anybody who just dismisses the reasons for the war as a fraud is either incapable or unwilling to seriously examine the geopolitical situation prior to the war. I expect better from you.