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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (736333)	4/11/2006 6:26:41 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 769670

April 11, 2006 Editorial Military Fantasies on Iran Iraq shows just how badly things can go wrong when an administration rashly embraces simple military solutions to complicated problems, shutting its ears to military and intelligence professionals who turn out to be tragically prescient. That lesson has yet to be absorbed by the Bush administration, which is now reportedly honing plans for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Congress and the country need to ask the administration just what is going on, and just what it hopes to accomplish by this latest saber rattling. If the administration's real goal is to change minds in Iran and energize diplomacy, it is not going about it in a very smart way. If, instead, it intends to proceed with a bombing campaign when and if diplomacy fails, Congress and the public need to force the kind of serious national debate that never really took place before the American invasion of Iraq. Routine contingency planning goes on all the time in the Pentagon, but the discussions on Iran seem to have progressed beyond this level, with high administration officials pushing the process and dropping indirect hints of possible future American military action in language that sometimes recalls statements made before the invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post reports that two main options are being seriously considered — a limited strike against Iranian nuclear-related sites or a broader campaign against a wider range of military and political targets. The planners are also looking at ways America could use tactical nuclear weapons to penetrate Iran's heavily reinforced underground uranium enrichment complex at Natanz. The British government is said to take Washington's planning exercises seriously enough to have worked out security arrangements for its own diplomats and citizens in the event of American air attacks. War with Iran would be reckless folly, especially with most of America's ground forces tied up in Iraq, where they are particularly vulnerable to retaliation from Iran and its Iraqi Shiite allies. Nor is there any guarantee that such a conflict would remain limited to airstrikes. Bombing alone probably cannot destroy all of Iran's nuclear facilities, some of which are underground and fortified, and possibly others in unknown locations. In fact, Iran already has much of the material and know-how to make nuclear bombs, and is believed to be about 10 years away from building them. The best hope for avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran lies in encouraging political evolution there over the next decade. It is important to make clear to the Iranian people that they have no need for nuclear weapons and would actually be better off without them. Years of frustrating diplomacy have not managed to deflect Iran's nuclear ambitions, but American airstrikes are not likely to either. The best they could hope to achieve is delay, but that result would be far outweighed by the likely consequences. An American bombing campaign would surely rally the Iranian people behind the radical Islamic government and the nuclear program, with those effects multiplied exponentially if the Pentagon itself resorted to nuclear weapons in the name of trying to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs.

To: JDN who wrote (736333)	4/11/2006 7:58:04 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Re: "I believe President Bush's goal was to remove Saddam and replace it with a Democratic type government for all the people of Iraq." Two QUICK points: #1) If that was 'his goal', it would have been NICE if he had bothered to let the public in on it, so they would know, and we wouldn't have to SPECULATE about secret, non-public goals now. (One could EASILY speculate that another non-public goal was to 'grab the oil', to force privatization upon Iraq, etc., etc.) The problem with non-public supposed 'goals' like the above is that there is no way to PROVE any of 'em... and the public had PLENTY of reasons to NOT believe that Bush's 'real goal' was nation-building, because he SPOKE OUT SO STRONGLY AGAINST IT DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES. Seems like if he'd changed his mind about such a big thing, the least he could do --- before running up potentially a trillion dollars on the taxpayer's credit cards --- would have been to let people know. #2) I'm not at all sure that you can FORCE 'Democracy' on a people... for then it WOULDN'T be Democracy. Democracy needs to be self-grown. (You CAN defeat armies, and topple Dictators... but you can't force people to have a society that YOU want, if they don't wwant to... or if they RESENT you because of patriotism/nationalism, etc. "I believe, he was led to believe (rightly or wrongly) by the Iraqi's themselves that this is what THEY wanted." A smarter man, more experienced in foreign affairs, would have known not to believe the empty blandisments of con men like Chalabi --- and would have relied more upon the US Arabist and Middle Eastern experts in Defense and State and CIA.... "Now it is beginning to appear the BASTARDS would rather fight over Religious matters then establish a fair government by and for ALL the people." It ain't just religion --- they are also fighting for all the other classic reasons --- for political power, for control of land and resources, for money, for nationalism, for their ethnic groups and tribes, etc., etc. But, anyone who AUTOMATICALLY made the assumption before the war, that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds all wanted the same things, all wanted a 'strong' central government in 'Iraq' was just smoking something. The Sunnis have been stepping on the necks of the others for centuries... and want to keep being able to do so --- just like their Sunni neighbors in Saudi Arabia do. The Shiites want payback, and they want control. And, the Kurds, of course, want their OWN COUNTRY, Kurdistan. President Bush I knew this. Powell knew this... Bush II (for whatever reasons...) bet wrong.