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

To: LindyBill who wrote (15273)	11/5/2003 4:41:30 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793630

I have no clue what I said to provoke that. I thought we were having a constructive discussion and that you thought so, too. I'm sorry if I irritated you. You had said you couldn't see any good reasons for our liberation of Iraq. If I said that, it was sloppy wording or has been taken out of context. It's quite contrary to the point I've been trying to get across. The point I have continued to try to make is that I haven't heard an explanation for why we would choose to take such an expensive and risky tack as Iraq when there were other better targeted, less risky, and less expensive alternatives. It makes more sense to me, for example, to use the resources on border inspections, R&D of detection equipment, background checks on aliens, intelligence, etc. I will hold that opinion until I hear some reason why Iraq was a better use. You haven't told me why Iraq was a better use of a few hundred billion fungible dollars. Nor why we shouldn't apply more resources, for example, to optimize detection of threats within our borders. One bomb from Baghdad would pay for a lot of background investigations, a lot of language training, a lot of cargo inspection. Those are all politically possible approaches. Why not take them? The key to my realization of your thinking was when you rejected the concept that keeping up our "no-fly" mini-war was too expensive, time consuming, and left us too tied up with Saddam in the ME. Are you saying that that mini-war was as expensive as the big war? I admit I don't pay a lot of attention to such things, but it seems intuitively obvious that the cost would be a small percentage of what we're gotten ourselves into since. That whole operation was on auto-pilot and required almost no attention from the WH. I could be missing something, I suppose. I don't understand why that was so "telling" for you. The major consideration is "what is politically possible?" Starting the "Slum Clearance" with Iraq was. Moving on Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria wasn't. I agree that those others were not as politically possible, although some of the politically possibility for Iraq was manufactured so a case could probably have been made for Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, the simple fact that it's politically possible is not reason to do Iraq. Unless one things we have to be attacking somebody just to be doing something. You and I are working with different premises. We are so far apart on them that we would just be arguing past each other to continue a war/no war discussion about our reasons for going into Iraq. I started replying to your message before reading it all the way through. I have too many words invested in it now to erase it, but I can stop whenever you like. If it's not useful to you, then it won't be useful to me, either. I already said once on this thread that this isn't a good venue for substantive discussions. It's a minor miracle that you've been able to provide a place for people to post articles and make brief position statements while remaining civil. It doesn't lend itself to turning things over and inspecting them. I understand that. I'm just a cockeyed optimist, I guess.