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

To: KyrosL who wrote (136394)	6/12/2004 3:01:35 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The problem with your argument is that you fail to see how the nukes would have given Saddam the ability to blackmail in any number of ways. He doesn't really need conventional military power. Assume he gets his hands on 2 to 6 nuclear weapons. He then demands that Iraq's 19th province a/k/a Kuwait annex itself politically to Iraq, otherwise it will suffer nuclear devastation. No one believes him, so he drops a nuke over Kuwait City. What do you propose be done in response? The Kuwaitis refuse, so he drops another nuke. What then? Does the US drop a nuke over Baghdad? Obviously not, since 99.999% of its population is innocent and has nothing to do with Saddam. It would be barbaric. We threaten conventional warfare against Saddam, then. He says that if any kind of conventional military threat is made against him, he will set off a nuke over Riyadh or Beirut. We assemble a conventional force against him, and sure enough a mushroom cloud appears over Riyadh. In the meantime, oil goes to $175 a barrel. The Western economies go off the deep end. The Dow goes to 500. Gasoline is at $10-12 a gallon. Complete economic chaos in the West. We are probably forced to negotiate with the evil SOB. Do you see a common thread here? Saddam doesn't need a conventional military force to create enormous chaos and economic dislocation in the West. And he was clearly crazy enough to do something like what I have just described. Saddam's domestic nuclear and WMD program was irrelevant if he were to have been able to buy nukes on the black market. How easy are they to buy? That is a very good question. I don't know. But we do have nonsecure Russian nukes, Pakistan, and N. Korea to worry about. And, if available, Saddam has no need for a domestic WMD program. It's reason why I personally don't think that the failure to find WMD in any signficant quantities in Iraq is very important. There were other very good reasons other than existing WMD in Iraq that justify the war. in my view, anyway. It's the elephant in the bedroom. I've yet to see a decent set of arguments to counter it, but like an elephant, I'm all ears.