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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (135049)	5/31/2004 11:41:04 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Actually, according to Clarke and others, including now Bush, it did work with Saddam. There is no good evidence of any firm connections between Saddam and any terrorist acts in the last decade aimed at America. Swell, is he telepathic now? Seriously, you don't think he has a wee bit of political investment in this answer? I think at the end of the day Saddam's funding through his intelligence service to various terrorist organizations will come out. To use these guys against the Kurds and the Americans was too damn tempting for Saddam. There is a lot of evidence of his funding Ansar, chief of which is the continuous presence and funding of Zarqawi. The funding to the Palestinian terrorists was open enough. You may think that the anti-Israel Islamists have nothing to do with the anti-America Islamists; I would like to point out that this is not what they say or do themselves, but nevermind. Furthermore, the important question people had to ask themselves before the war is never going to be answered by hard evidence - namely, with sanctions collapsing, Saddam getting more and more revenues, Saddam proclaiming himself the Great Defyer and a pious Islamist (that much was known) - what did he PLAN to do after sanctions collapsed and he had freedom of movement and freedom of shopping again? No serious answer to that question could have been very comforting to the US or any country in the region. We did not want to see the Arab states returning into Iraq's orbit again, as they would have done, from fear, once Saddam had nukes! Policy makers have to consider this kind of thing. What do you do when limited force doesn't work? The best example, of course, is the Israeli/Palestinian problem Actually, no. The Israeli/Pal conflict is sui generis because hundreds of other countries are so invested in it - politically, monetarily, you name it - that it bears no resemblance to ordinary struggles that are settled between the parties when they get tired of fighting, like Sri Lanka. when enough blood has run I suspect that cooler heads will prevail and then the sides will tire of the killing and accept the inevitability of making an uncomfortable peace that will hopefully grow into something permanent. But how much blood will run first? Ask the Palestinians, they are the ones who want to keep fighting. The Israelis are the ones who have to give up the land, they showed they are ready to do so. It was Arafat who said no. It was Arafat who launched this Terror War. If the Palestinians keep insisting on a "right of return" for millions of Palestinians there will indeed be more blood because Israel will not consent to commit national suicide, and the Palestinians are not strong enough to defeat them (indeed, on military terms they depend on Israeli restraint. Imagine if they were fighting the Russians). If Arafat dies, and is replaced by a leader who can conceive of peace as a good thing (Arafat obviously cannot), then something like the Taba deal may not look so bad.