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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (37435)	4/2/2004 1:01:58 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793914

Hitchens sells at least one column a month to WSJ.com. What a difference 911 makes! WHAT'S AT STAKE Fallujah A reminder of what the future might look like if we fail. BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS Friday, April 2, 2004 12:01 a.m. There must be a temptation, when confronted with the Dantesque scenes from Fallujah, to surrender to something like existential despair. The mob could have cooked and eaten its victims without making things very much worse. One especially appreciated the detail of the heroes who menaced the nurses, when they came to try and remove the charred trophies. But this "Heart of Darkness" element is part of the case for regime-change to begin with. A few more years of Saddam Hussein, or perhaps the succession of his charming sons Uday and Qusay, and whole swathes of Iraq would have looked like Fallujah. The Baathists, by playing off tribe against tribe, Arab against Kurd and Sunni against Shiite, were preparing the conditions for a Hobbesian state of affairs. Their looting and beggaring of the state and the society--something about which we now possess even more painfully exact information--was having the same effect. A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what. Obviously, this prospect could never have been faced with equanimity. Iraq is a regional keystone state with vast resources and many common borders. Its implosion would have created a black hole, sucking in rival and neighboring powers, tempting them with opportunist interventions and encouraging them to find ethnic and confessional proxies. And who knows what the death-throes of the regime would have been like? We are entitled, on past experience, to guess. There could have been deliberate conflagrations started in the oilfields. There might have been suicidal lunges into adjacent countries. The place would certainly have become a playground for every kind of nihilist and fundamentalist. The intellectual and professional classes, already gravely attenuated, would have been liquidated entirely. All of this was, only just, averted. And it would be a Pangloss who said that the dangers have receded even now. But at least the international intervention came before the whole evil script of Saddam's crime family had been allowed to play out. A subsequent international intervention would have been too little and too late, and we would now being holding an inquest into who let this happen--who in other words permitted in Iraq what Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Kofi Annan permitted in Rwanda, encouraged by the Elysée. Prescience, though, has now become almost punishable. Thanks in part to Richard Clarke's showmanship (and to the crass ineptitude of the spokesmen for the Bush administration) it is widely considered laughable to have even thought about an Iraqi threat. Given Saddam's record in both using and concealing weapons of mass destruction, and given his complicity--at least according to Mr. Clarke--with those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and with those running Osama bin Laden's alleged poison factory in Sudan, any president who did not ask about a potential Baathist link to terrorism would be impeachably failing in his duty. It's becoming more and more plain that the moral high ground is held by those who concluded, from the events of 1991, that it was a mistake to leave Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait. However tough that regime-change might have been, it would have spared the lives of countless Iraqis and begun the process of nation-rebuilding with 12 years' advantage, and before most of the awful damage wrought by the sanctions-plus-Saddam "solution." People like Paul Wolfowitz are even more sinister than their mocking foes believe. They were against Saddam Hussein not just in September 2001 but as far back as the 1980s. (James Mann's excellent book "Rise of the Vulcans," greatly superior to Richard Clarke's, will I hope not be eclipsed by it. It contains an account that every serious person should ponder.) I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. Clarke's word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf War"? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose? I hope I do not misrepresent my opponents, but their general view seems to be that Iraq was an elective target; a country that would not otherwise have been troubling our sleep. This ahistorical opinion makes it appear that Saddam Hussein was a new enemy, somehow chosen by shady elements within the Bush administration, instead of one of the longest-standing foes with which the United States, and indeed the international community, was faced. So, what about the "bad news" from Iraq? There was always going to be bad news from there. Credit belongs to those who accepted--can we really decently say pre-empted?--this long-term responsibility. Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand. Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. He is writing a study of Thomas Jefferson for the "Eminent Lives" series, from HarperCollins. Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (37435)	4/2/2004 1:16:24 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

American Thinker - A Brilliant and Elegant Solution Reader Martin Kelly, of Glasgow, Scotland, writes of a plan to address the problems created by the BBC's notorious political bias, while it enjoys the status of a government monopoly receiving compulsory license fees from all UK television owners., With his permission, we reproduce the letter he wrote us. Dear Sirs, Michawl Morris's article is quite a good look at the political bias that surrounds the BBC, even after the Hutton Report. He is perhaps a little unfair on Frank Gardner, who at least has the distinction of being one of the few BBC news staff who can pronounce 'Al Qa'eda' properly. This phrase, the liberal equivalent of 'nucular', is still pronounced phonetically, Al-Qa-e-da, by many in the organisation, so give credit where credit's due. What's missing from the article is an appreciation of the law governing the BBC and the recent steps the Conservatives have taken to address its future should they regain office. The BBC is a corporation, holding a Royal Charter. that charter must be reviewed every 10 years, and is next up in 2006. The Conservatives recently commissioned a TV exceutive called David Elstein, whose credentials include 'The World at War', to produce a report on how his former employers should fund themselves in a post-licence fee era. His conclusion was startlingly simple. In the regime of the recently deposed Greg Dyke, the BBC spent billions developing an output exclusively for digital TV. The BBC has several channels, like BBC3 and BBC4, which analogue licence fee payers like myself fund but cannot watch. The Labour government plans to switch off the analogue signal in 2010 at the very latest. By then, every household will obviously require access to digital, as opposed to the current half. This is not such a daunting prospect, as digital TV was unheard of in the UK as recently as 1998. Elstein's solution was simple. Post licence fee, the BBC should go all subscription. This would remove the element of illegality in non-possession of a licence fee, while making it easier for non-payers to simply have their digital signal switched off remotely if they do not pay for it. A brilliantly simple and elegant solution. The BBC's liberal bias is beyond a joke. Like what I can divine of American broadcast news, it comes from a very narrow metropolitan prism of a few people who live in a few North London postcode areas. However, most of the rest of us aren't so daft as to be taken in. Best regards, Martin Kelly Glasgow

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (37435)	4/2/2004 2:13:16 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793914

Poor New York Times. Their reporters just can't help themselves. "EllisBlog." Kerry Fever Grips Hub And New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney. This is a direct quote from his front-page "analysis" published today: "Mr. Kerry's low profile occurs at what would seem to be a particularly opportune time for the senator. Mr. Bush has been struggling with questions about his record on terrorism, and Mr. Kerry had been riding on a wave of excitement after his capture of the Democratic nomination." (emphasis added) It hit me like a tsunami.