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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (7521)	11/17/1998 8:17:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

George, Sadam can start and abort a crisis at his will That much I can agree with. But I cannot jump from there to the conclusion that Saddam is in control of events. He cannot deploy his armed forces at will. He cannot deal with the Kurds as he would wish to. He cannot even move freely in his own country. He may be able to hide weapons of mass destruction, but he can't deploy them on any effective delivery system. He certainly cannot threaten Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Saddam periodically tests the waters to see how much he can get away with. Each time he does, the US and allies have to draw the proverbial line in the sand and maintain the status quo. While this may seem like Saddam jerking the US around, it's hard to deny that the status quo is more favorable to the US than it is to Saddam. It should perhaps be pointed out that if the US hadn't built up Saddam as a counterweight to Khomeini this might not have been necessary. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. It is true that the principal victims of the sanctions have been ordinary Iraquis, but it is difficult to see how lifting them would do anything but boost Saddam's cause. I have not followed the ground rules of the weapons inspections closely enough to evaluate them. Have the changes been arbitrary, or a response to changing observations and circumstances? It still seems possible that if the Iraqi military suffers sufficiently, some colonel somewhere might decide that Allah wishes Saddam to meet with a 9mm bullet. At which point things will get really complicated. I do hope the CIA can refrain from trying to accomplish that end, though. They would probably whack the wrong guy, and the whole thing would end up on every front page on earth. 1) Anyone can get access to weapons of mass destruction (now that's scary) 2) There is absolutely no consistency in US foreign policy Partly true, though not entirely. Most states can obtain such weapons, but are apparently convinced that the price they would pay for using them would negate any hypothetical advantage which might be gained. This is one area in which US policy has been reasonably consistent and fairly effective. Nobody has done it yet. To say that US policy has been inconsistent, you would have to point to an analogous situation which has been handled differently. Did you have one in mind? Steve