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To: Jess Beltz who wrote (12388)	2/22/1998 9:19:00 AM
From: diana g	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

That is a thought-provoking hypothesis, Jess.<eom>

To: Jess Beltz who wrote (12388)	2/22/1998 1:47:00 PM
From: Erwin	Respond to of 95453

Interesting analysis. Erwin

To: Jess Beltz who wrote (12388)	2/22/1998 10:00:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

Jess, you offer some intriguing analysis, but I'm not very convinced. But the key element you give to support it is >For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the way they now need our support and protection, there will be no further attempts to hold the West hostage over a barrel of oil. I agree that it undoubtably feels good to the Pentagon to have an oversized presence in the gulf, but really, do you feel that the oil-producing gulf states still have a lot of pricing power? In today's international oil market, that's where your senario doesn't really hold up, IMHO. re >All of those tankers going out of the gulf loaded with oil sail right by US aircraft carriers that keep make it all possible. I'm not sure I follow the whole line of reasoning there. If our aircraft carriers weren't there, how do the tankers stop going out of the gulf? Actually, I believe that the flow of oil out of the gulf is probably more inhibited now with the recent buildup of military ships. All those warships need "security space" around them, and I have no doubt that there are some "pain in the butt" traffic problems in scheduling departing oil tankers, due to the increased warship presence. Also, re >The only external threat was Iran, and we could have left a token force in the field to draw a line in the sand with the explicit message, you invade Iraq and we'll do the same thing to you we did to them. After our convincing display of power, that would have been more than enough. There you go. Doesn't this undermine your theory that we need Saddam there? After all, isn't only a token US presence threat enough? The fact is, all of those Gulf countries together are not a serious military obstacle to the US forces, if it came down to that. Re >We could have destroyed the republican guards completely, within the mandate given to us, because we had them trapped in a pocket around Bassra, and we let them go (and I think Schwarzkopf was very opposed to this too.) Why? Do you recall the "road of death"? Remember the hot and indignant editorials right after the Gulf War, accusing the US of highly unnecessary slaughter? Our planes were bombing with impunity the departing Iraqi war machinery on the highway going north from Kuwait to Iraq. I think the only reason more people didn't get upset about that was that our military was destroying costly military hardware primarily, but of course the hardware had drivers, so lives were lost. But I can imagine that the Bush administration had no intention of engaging in a "fish in the barrel" wholesale slaughter of primarily men. Furthermore, the mandate did not extend to driving to Baghdad, so therefore there HAD TO BE some kind of line where we stopped and said, "Okay, our objective of driving Iraq out of Kuwait is accomplished. There's no more need to endanger American lives." All IMHO. DK