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

To: epicure who wrote (139505)	7/8/2004 9:41:59 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hardly makes the guy a crazy fool though, does it? You could argue that, for a guy in Saddam's position, aggressive paranoia is a sane reaction. It hardly makes it more comfortable for anyone else to live with, or easier to predict which way his paranoia would make him jump next. So no thanks are owed, I did not support your position. If Saddam says that internal political considerations made him invade Kuwait, then it wasn't US 'signals' that made him do it. He was going to do it anyway and we didn't realize it it time to try to scare him off it. If we could have, which is doubtful. If Saddam thought his immediate survival depended on distracting his generals, well, immediate survival usually takes precedence in decision-making. We certainly had no luck scaring him out of his weapons programs after the Gulf War. I think it is important going forward to realize that if we had understood Saddam better we could have saved a lot of money, and stopped ourselves from taking a huge gamble in the ME Everybody is understandable in hindsight. Some guys are just not understandable in foresight - especially when they are absolute dictators whose craziest whims can become state policy in an instant. Saddam was one of these.