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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (136367)	6/12/2004 1:13:51 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You can say it, and it can be true, but it doesn't matter. There will be people who will always believe what they believe regardless of facts. The US is, afterall, a hugely religious country- our citizens are raised on belief- so it's no wonder they find it impossible to integrate facts that conflict with beliefs.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (136367)	6/12/2004 10:17:28 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

There was no reason why we had to rush to war against Iraq. Sanctions were working. No, they weren't working. They were breaking down, and soon would have become at utter joke. Look at the money Saddam took under the Oil-For-Food program, while he bribed the French and Russians and everybody else, took all the money, and starved the Iraqis. There's sanctions for you. You call that working? Meanwhile, the French and the Russians were agitating hard to lift sanctions altogether - helped by Saddam's dead baby parade. Sanctions would not have lasted much longer, maybe a year or two. The moment the sanctions were lifted, Saddam was free to go shopping - at AQ Khan's Sam's Club for Nukes. Perhaps even before, since there were no inspectors. Come on, Saddam is on record saying his mistake in 1990 was invading Kuwait before he had a nuke. You think he wouldn't have wanted one? Just consider this possibility: the sanctions were lifted due to increased UNSC opposition to them, and Saddam gets himself a nuke. Meantime, his popularity in the Arab world soars as the Great & Successful Defier of the Great Satan. This mantra: "Saddam was contained. Saddam was contained." is just not true. Saddam had good, good buddies on the UNSC, France and Russia, who had BILLIONS of reasons to free him from his containment. And it was working. Colin Powell went to the UN in 2001 (pre September) to try to shore up the sanctions - and got his head handed to him. Containment, which was never designed as a long term policy anyway, has been failing for years. Oil-for-Food scams, no UN inspectors, rampant smuggling through Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Oh, the Iraqi people may have suffered from sanctions, but that too Saddam saw as a benefit. Meantime, the US was paying, the US was getting no benefit, the US was taking a huge propaganda hit. That's one reason that Bill Clinton made regime change in Iraq an official US policy in 1998.