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

To: LindyBill who wrote (15240)	11/5/2003 7:11:54 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793603

We could not keep up what we were doing with him and go after other ME countries first. Bah. The cost of keeping a few planes cruising over Iraq is a drop in the budgetary bucket and hardly a dent in the Pentagon's readiness. A few State Dept resources for periodic dances over sanctions. Not a major resource consumption. With minimal expenditure, a backwater of a country was kept in stasis. It's not worth a bazillion dollars to fix a backwater, even assuming we can fix it, which is a huge assumption. I agree we had to do something about our image problem, but it didn't have to be in Iraq. No one, I repeat, No one, in the world disagreed that Saddam had WMD. And this is salient because...? Lotsa countries have WMD, as we're now defining them. We didn't invade them. That's not a reason, in and of itself. No one, I repeat, no one <g> thought that Iraq had the means to target the US with their WMD. Except through planting some terrorists on our soil, terrorists who could then do just what McVeigh did, and what Malasian terrorists could do, or Norwegian terrorists. Makes much more sense to me to focus our efforts on stopping the Iraqis and any other bad guys, foreign or domestic, from using WMD against us. I'm not saying there is no value in destroying WMD where they sit in the ME, only that it is irrational to blow bazillions on that when the resources could be used to keep terrorists off our soil or to erradicate the WMD that are accessible to terrorists here. Focus, focus, focus. We have to keep unrelenting pressure on these regimes to make them afraid to harbor them, while we root them out. I see no other way out. If we don't do this, then we will have to retreat out of there, make some noises, and do nothing until we are hit again. There's the "do nothing" "argument" again. This is not a binary scenario--invade Iraq or do nothing. I won't argue against your point about "unrelenting pressure..." But I will continue to argue Iraq until I see your binary light bulb come on.