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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (136448)	6/13/2004 11:35:58 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

<<< 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.>>> There are two questions here where we disagree. 1). Was Saddam Hussein contained? 2). Did Saddam Hussein have friends on the UNSC? 1. Obviously by your definition he was not contained. Unless he was in jail somewhere he was not by your definition contained. But, was he contained sufficiently for us not to rush to war - not to waste billions of dollars - not to have thousands of our troops killed and injured - and not to have an unknown number of Iraqi civilians to be killed and injured (or don't they count)? Could we have waited and formulated a better plan to restructure Iraq after getting rid of Saddam Hussein? Could we have gotten more international support and gotten the international community to share the cost in terms of money and human resources? You could answer negatively on all the above only if you thought that if we didn't get rid of Saddam Hussein now, (because Saddam Hussein had more resolve than we did and that he was more clever and would have gotten the international community behind him, and time favored Saddam Hussein) and that we would never have another chance to get rid of him. I disagree with that. I thought that Saddam Hussein was a dead man walking and it was only a matter of time when he would fall. I believe that we could have gotten rid of him at far less cost, both in terms of money and human toll, and something much more valuable - our reputation around the world as the ultimate good guys. Ultimately our disagreement comes down to mathematics (and I think you are a math major?). We both agree on the objectives. But what is the cost and what is the benefit in the two approaches? 2) Does Saddam Hussein have friends on the UNSC? That must be a joke. Do you think Iraq is more important to either Russia or France than the United States. For every billion dollars business any country does with Iraq, there are hundreds of billions in business with the United States. France is an historic ally. I think it is a tremendous dis-service to our country to portray France as an enemy.