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

To: Neocon who wrote (153555)	12/7/2004 3:54:52 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nicely written but contains a number of significant flaws in logic: Iraq appears to be emerging as the chief REVISIONIST power, bent on upending the international system. Opinion only. What basis do you have for this speculation? Saddam could easily walk over the regimes in the Arabian peninsula, This is absolutely and undeniably false. Even the reduced US and "allied" forces already present in the Gulf could have re-pulverized Saddam quickly. Gulf War I, a decade of continued attacks by US and allied forces and containment made sure Saddam could not significantly rearm. Putting North Korea and Iraq together as a modern day equivalent to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia is imaginative, but not very apt. For one, both North Korea and Iraq are isolated and in one case at least, virtually surrounded by capable enemies not the least of which is the most powerful army and airforce on the planet backed up by the most capable navy. Your concluding paragraph is the most damaging to your case, repeated here: When a principal part of the "coalition" against the United States is terrorist organizations, with the possibility of irregular, dirty warfare involving WMDs, delivered by supposed freelance groups, without clear assignment of responsibility or ability to make a clearcut retaliation, there is no effective deterrence. Without effective deterrence, there are only two alternatives: at some point, we go in with guns blazing, or we keep taking it on the chin until blood gushes and we throw in the towel. Go in blazing, exactly where? Where the terrorists are not? That seems to have been the plan and the result.