Bush's idiocy - disturbs me...

Between Iraq and a false case: Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong
Posted on Sunday, October 13 @ 09:05:50 EDT
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The president says the US has to act now against Iraq. The trouble is, his own security services don't agree.

By Neil Mackay, Glasgow Sunday Herald

George Bush was about to be hoist by his own petard. It was Monday last week, and the president was glad-handing with the great and the good at the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Ohio as he waited to give one of his most bellicose speeches yet.

In the audience were Ohio state governor Bob Taft and a host of business and political luminaries. As the deadline approached for the Senate and House of Representatives vote on whether or not to give Bush the backing he wanted to attack Iraq, this speech was to be the president's final flourish in the propaganda war to get the US marching in line behind him.

Calling Saddam Hussein a 'murderous tyrant', he made it clear why America had to finish off the Iraqi dictator. 'Facing clear evidence of peril,' he told the audience, 'we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.' He went on: 'We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from happening.'



What Bush could not have guessed was that his claims that Iraq was intent on attacking the USA had already began to unravel. The denouement started a few days before, on Thursday, October 3, when Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, metaphorically donned his hob-nailed boots and began delivering some well-aimed kicks to the head of George Tenet, the director of the CIA. The CIA, Graham said, were monkeying with democracy. The agency was not telling his committee what they needed to know about the Iraqi regime. Tenet was damaging the ability of Congress to assess the need for military action.

With one week until Congress voted on authorising Bush to use force, Graham was impatient. These are serious times, he said , and he needed serious answers. Graham and the committee had received an anodyne intelligence report from the CIA on the threat posed by Iraq the day before -- Wednesday, October 2. This, however, answered none of the questions the Senate committee wanted answered: would Saddam use weapons of mass destruction (WMD); how would his regime react if attacked; and what would be the consequences of war?

On October 9, almost a week after Tenet received his whipping at the hands of Graham, the senator's hardman approach paid off when the director of the CIA admitted that the only reason Saddam would use WMDs against the United States was if he was backed into a corner -- due to a strike by the American military -- and realised he was about to fall. Saddam, Tenet was saying, would only become the nightmare that Bush envisaged, if Bush attacked him first. Within two days, then, of Bush's flag-waving call to arms, his most senior intelligence officer had pulled the rug from under the biggest project of his presidency.

Tenet's admission left Bush in disarray with revelations making it appear as if the president was exaggerating the threat from Iraq, to say the least. Tenet, a loyal subject of the Bush administration, had no option but to come clean -- no matter how difficult a position it put the president in.

The CIA director's hands were tied on October 3 by Senator Graham, a democrat who represents Florida, when he told the CIA it was acting 'unacceptably', and added: 'We're trying to carry out a very important responsibility, and given the nature of this classified information, we are the only means by which the intelligence community can communicate to the legislative branch of government.'

There was no way that Tenet could play fast and loose with the Senate. Both the FBI and CIA have been attacked repeatedly in Congressional hearings since September 11 for a series of intelligence cock-ups.

Later on October 3, after Graham met with Tenet, his mood had changed -- Graham seemed to be cooler, calmer. He said the meeting had been frank and candid. What Graham wanted was a flavour of the classified National Intelligence Estimates, prepared by the National Intelligence Council, whose analysts report directly to Tenet. On Monday, October 7, around the time Bush was in Ohio cheerleading for war , Graham received just what he had been looking for -- it came in the shape of a letter from the CIA director. It made astonishing reading. Two days later, on Wednesday, October 9, the Senate intelligence committee voted to make the full text of Tenet's letter public.

Tenet's letter said he was declassifying selected material to help the Senate's deliberations on whether or not to support the president over attacking Iraq. 'Baghdad, for now, appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW (chemical and biological weapons) against the United States,' the declassified material read.

'Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means ... or CBW.

'Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the US would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.'

Tenet went on to declassify formerly secret evidence given at a closed hearing of the Senate's intelligence committee in which democrat Carl Levin, was told by a 'senior intelligence witness' that the 'probability ... would be low' of Saddam initiating a WMD attack. The agent also said the chances were 'pretty high' that Saddam would launch a WMD attack 'if we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis'. Tenet's revelations left the entire basis of Bush's call to arms in ruins, and the CIA director swiftly became an embarrassment to the president as the propaganda war backfired . Tenet was not deliberately trying to undermine Bush -- he was simply forced into a corner by the Senate and compelled to reveal his true understanding of the Iraqi crisis.

Kenneth M Pollack, who worked as a military analyst at the CIA before serving as a top aide on Persian Gulf affairs on President Clinton's National Security Council, said: 'The agency line is that it is basically unlikely that Iraq would give WMDs to terrorists under most circumstances. The Bush administration is trying to make the case that Iraq might try to give WMDs to al-Qaeda under certain circumstances. But what the agency is saying is that Saddam is likely to give such weapons to terrorists only under extreme circumstances when he believes he is likely to be toppled.'

The White House tried to put a different spin on the Tenet letter. Sean McCormack, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said the portions of the letter released by Graham gave a misleading impression of the CIA's overall conclusion. 'There were parts of the Tenet letter that weren't read in,' he said. Other parts were 'taken out of context', he said. However, Graham's spokesman, Paul Anderson, denied there had been any misquoting, and the full document, which the Senate committee has released, supports Anderson's line.

Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, added pointedly: 'It's an overwhelming temptation to manipulate intelligence to serve policy and, to some extent, I think that's what's happening here with Iraq.'

Tenet did, however, leave the Bush conspiracists something to cling to. In his letter to Graham, he played up the alleged links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, saying: 'We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.

Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression ... we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members ... we have credible reporting that al-Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq, who could help them acquire WMD capabilities ... Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.'

This was not a smoking gun, but it kept suspicions alive that Iraq might just pass terrorists WMDs any day now. Tenet's tentative connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is a far cry from the findings of his counterparts in Europe. Try as it might, the UK has been unable to produce any evidence clearly linking Saddam to bin Laden, and the French have positively ruled out any connection. Jean-Louis Brugui?re, France's leading terrorist investigator, says years of investigation into radical Islamic terror groups have not produced a trace of evidence linking them to Iraq.

Brugui?re is an investigative magistrate empowered to view French domestic and foreign intelligence material. Much of the material he sees is passed on to the CIA and FBI by French intelligence. He says: 'We have not found any link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Not a trace. There is no foundation to our investigations for the information given by the Americans.'

The French believe the secular nature of Saddam's regime deters him from getting into bed with the likes of bin Laden. It also makes cosying up to Saddam an anathema to the fundamentalists of al-Qaeda. Despite the admissions in the Tenet letter, the Senate voted 77-23 in the early hours of last Friday morning to authorise Bush to use force against Iraq. Earlier, the House of Representatives had voted the same way by a margin of 296-133.

It seems that most of the Senate listened to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's reply to claims that the White House was exaggerating the Iraqi threat.

'Each of us has a solemn responsibility,' he said, 'to do everything in our power to ensure that, when the history of this period is written, the books won't ask why we slept.'

The doubts of the intelligence community were washed away against such patriotic phrase-making. It should be noted, however, that a few senators listened to Tenet's admissions and voted 'no'. Among them was Senator Bob Graham.

©2002 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088.

C.I.A. Letter to Senate on Baghdad's Intentions


Following is the text of a letter dated Oct. 7 to Senator Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, by George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, about decisions to declassify material related to the debate about Iraq:


In response to your letter of 4 October 2002, we have made unclassified material available to further the Senate's forthcoming open debate on a Joint Resolution concerning Iraq.

As always, our declassification efforts seek a balance between your need for unfettered debate and our need to protect sources and methods. We have also been mindful of a shared interest in not providing to Saddam a blueprint of our intelligence capabilities and shortcomings, or with insight into our expectation of how he will and will not act. The salience of such concerns is only heightened by the possibility of hostilities between the U.S. and Iraq.

These are some of the reasons why we did not include our classified judgments on Saddam's decision-making regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.) in our recent unclassified paper on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Viewing your request with those concerns in mind, however, we can declassify the following from the paragraphs you requested:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. against the United States.

Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or C.B.W..

Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a W.M.D. attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:

Senator Levin: . . . If (Saddam) didn't feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?

Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack — let me put a time frame on it — in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.

Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you've . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what's the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?

Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.

In the above dialogue, the witness's qualifications — "in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now" — were intended to underscore that the likelihood of Saddam using W.M.D. for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise grows as his arsenal builds. Moreover, if Saddam used W.M.D., it would disprove his repeated denials that he has such weapons.

Regarding Senator Bayh's question of Iraqi links to Al Qaeda. Senators could draw from the following points for unclassified discussions:

Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.

Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.

Is anyone else up for moving a bit NORTHWARD yet??? :rolleyes:

Originally posted by saturntangerine
Is anyone else up for moving a bit NORTHWARD yet??? :rolleyes:

How about Southward????:D

Aw Christ - here we go again.

All the rehtoric we heard about how we could have avoided 9/11 if we had paid attention to the evidence - yet with even more evidence that Saddam is planning something we should do nothing? Recall that defectors from his regime have pointed out he has the materials and the will to use them. Did you see that in the report? No you don't. You're looking at a group that also has political capitol at stake here. Notice that I said "also". For some reason, people (especially here) think only a conservative can have political motivations.

BTW Tangie and Moss you want to head north? (south). Dont let the door hit you in the ass. They're nice spots to visit, but I sure dont want to live there (and pay those tax rates)

Let me use this - but pay attention to this quote more then any other.

If you believe, like Nelson Mandela, that Bush is the problem not Saddam, then the above makes perfect sense. But I wonder if the rest of the anti-Yank set have thought it through. They may routinely say that "Bush frightens me," but they're posing; their lack of action makes plain that the Great Satan doesn't frighten them at all. They know America could project itself anywhere and blow up anything, but it doesn't. It could tell the UN to go screw itself, but it's not that impolite. Imagine any previous power of the last thousand years with America's unrivalled hegemony and unparalleled military superiority in a unipolar world with nothing to stand in its way but UN resolutions. Pick whoever you like: the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, Napoleon, the Vikings. That's really frightening.


Nelson Mandela says it's the U.S. and not Saddam Hussein who's "the threat to world peace." David Collenette regrets that the Soviet Union is no longer around to act as a check on American "bullying." Sweden's Goran Persson wants to build up the EU because it's "one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination." Sweden was scrupulously relaxed about Nazi world domination and Soviet world domination, but sometimes there are threats so monstrous that even in Stockholm you have to get off the fence. In Germany Gerhard Schroeder is Chancellor today because his party successfully articulated the great menace that George W. Bush poses to the planet. Feel free to insert standard "arrogant cowboy" imagery and other examples of rampant Texaphobia.

Let's suppose for a moment that these fellows are right: that America is a bully and a menace. The question then arises: So what are you going to do about it? Well, Mr. Mandela's country has been busy selling aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment centrifuges to Saddam. The First Secretary of the South African Embassy in Jordan is serving as the local sales rep to Iraqi procurement agents. Thanks to these sterling efforts, they're bringing significantly closer the day when the entire Middle East, much of Africa and even Europe will be under the Saddamite nuclear umbrella and thus safe from Bush's aggression.

Way to go, Nelson! But where are the rest of the slackers? I don't pretend to have all the answers -- well, OK, I do, but only when I'm being interviewed on TV shows -- but I find it a bit odd that the anti-American crowd, once you strip away the moral preening, don't seem to have any answers.

Worse, in confronting the Bush terror, they've developed the curious habit of mistaking the Great Satan's strengths for weaknesses. A couple of weeks back, I wrote about "the extraordinary innovations of the Afghan campaign, when men in traditional Uzbek garb sat on horses and used laser technology to guide USAF bombers to their targets." There followed the usual flurry of huffy e-mails from Canada and Europe insisting this proved absolutely nothing as the cowardly Yanks hadn't had the "guts" to send in ground troops.

I've heard this for a year now and I don't get it. So war's like cricket? There's only one correct way to play? The idea that it doesn't count unless it's the Battle of the Somme is most peculiar. Whether or not America has "no stomach for body bags," in Afghanistan there was no need for them.

There's something a little bewildering about an anti-war movement suddenly pining for the noble sacrifice of the poor bloody infantryman up to his neck in muck and bullets. But, if the Rest Of The World honestly believes the Pentagon are long-range, high-tech, sissy-boy warmongers, let me say again: Why not do something about it? The fact that the U.S. is responsible for 40% of the planet's military spending pales in comparison to the really critical statistic: It's responsible for almost 80% of military research-and-development spending. The gap between America and its NATO "allies" widens every day. You think those unmanned reconnaissance drones high in the sky over Kandahar were mighty fancy? They've now got a five-pound computerized drone you can fit in your backpack. In Afghanistan, a handful of prototype robots assisted in the cave-by-cave search for al-Qaeda crazies. We can only guess at the new toys the Great Satan will have in five years' time, but, whatever they are, I'll bet my in-tray is still getting sneering missives from around the world: "So now the bloody Yank nancy boys are using flying nuclear cheeseburgers launched from the Diego Garcia Burger King. Not exactly the Bengal Lancers, is it?"

If you don't like this scenario, there's only one way to change it: Get back in the game. At the recent NATO meeting, Don Rumsfeld invited his colleagues to demonstrate their seriousness by setting up a Rapid Reaction Force. He meant a real, actual Rapid Reaction Force, not a fictitious one like the European Union's. You may recall Louis Michel, the Belgian Foreign Minister, insisting late last year that the European Rapid Reaction Force "must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability." As The Washington Post remarked, "Apparently in Europe this works." But, invited to set up a actual functioning RRF, the Continentals bristled: the cost would divert valuable resources from social programs and might mean they'd have to cut back on welfare payments to Islamic terrorists.

So instead the plan is to diminish U.S. hegemony by spending zip on defence and putting all their eggs in the UN basket-case. Structurally, the UN is a creature of the Cold War. It formalized the stalemate of East and West: It was designed to prevent rather than enable action; it tended toward inertia, which was no bad thing given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the alternative. But we no longer have a bipolar world, and so the vetoes only work one way -- to restrain the sole surviving superpower. And, looked at from the menacing bullying Great Satan's point of view, it's hard to see what's in it for them. But then the anti-Yanks' fetishization of the UN's Cold War structures is consistent with their general retro approach to the geopolitical scene: As with trench warfare, the more obsolescent the concept, the more eagerly they embrace it.

Indeed, just to complete their embrace of the metaphorical Austin Powers Nehru jacket, the left has finally signed on to the concept of "deterrence." In the Cold War, they wanted no truck with this repulsive theory: Why, the notion that "Mutually Assured Destruction" and a "balance of terror" would protect us was morally contemptible and consigned our children to live under the perpetual shadow of Armageddon. But with Saddam it'll work just swell apparently. He's a "rational actor": Even if he gets nukes -- even if he has them now -- he's not crazy enough to use them.

I can't see it myself. To pursue the analogy, deterrence means allowing Saddam to turn the bulk of the Middle East into his version of Eastern Europe, a collection of neutered and subverted client states, beginning with Jordan. Millions of people beyond Iraq's borders will be informally conscripted into Saddam's prison and bequeathed to his even nuttier son.

If you believe, like Nelson Mandela, that Bush is the problem not Saddam, then the above makes perfect sense. But I wonder if the rest of the anti-Yank set have thought it through. They may routinely say that "Bush frightens me," but they're posing; their lack of action makes plain that the Great Satan doesn't frighten them at all. They know America could project itself anywhere and blow up anything, but it doesn't. It could tell the UN to go screw itself, but it's not that impolite. Imagine any previous power of the last thousand years with America's unrivalled hegemony and unparalleled military superiority in a unipolar world with nothing to stand in its way but UN resolutions. Pick whoever you like: the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, Napoleon, the Vikings. That's really frightening.

Before September 11th, most Americans tolerated the anti-Yank diatribes from the Rest Of The West as a quaint example of the local culture. Filtered through the smoke of the World Trade Center, it's no longer quite so cute. The real phenomenon of the last year is not Europe's or Canada's anti-Americanism, which has always existed, but a deep, pervasive and wholly new American weariness with its so-called allies. Saddam's creditors in Moscow, his under-the-table trading partners in Paris and his kindred spirits in the thug states may yet team up to stymie America at the UN, and Nelson, David, Goran, Gerhard and the European "peace" marchers will cheer. Be careful what you wish for.













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Hard to know what to make of all this. But let me try to separate heads from tails here for just a moment.

To me, it is certainly understandable why much of the rest of the world feels threatened by the U.S., being the sole remaining superpower. That's a small portion of the world's surface area and population holding a great deal of the chips. And why many Americans, seemingly many liberals, in turn are fearful of the power and leadership of their own country. It is no mystery that the average American citizen has very limited political power, largely because Americans are too lazy to even attempt to take a role in politics. However, whatever the case, most Americans feel powerless when it comes to having a hand in how our international affairs play out. You feed these people all that liberal media material about how evil Bush is, with admittedly weighted stories, destroying Bush’s credibility in rightfully having a bone to pick with Iraq, and you are damned right that they, myself included, will be fearful of the man at the helm. Our fearless leader? Sure, he seems to be fearless, I’ll give him that, but being fearless is supposed to inspire confidence in the people you lead, not anxiety. As opposed to saying “well, times are scary, but at least we’ve got Bush in the White House to guide us through,” I think many seem to be saying “times are scary, and having Bush as the President makes them only scarier.”

Let’s forget about Bush for a moment. The articles quoted above offer contrasting viewpoints, that's for sure, but I think that it really boils down to a take home message, that IMO cannot be ignored. Saddam may already have WMD’s. If that's the case, you halt your attack and back away slowly, and take great pains to carefully establish parameters for a stalemate, as we did with the USSR in the Cold War, and as should always be the case with mutually-assured destruction. No matter how many times over we outgun the Iraqi military, all it takes is one WMD that can strike the U.S. accurately, and the game is up. Even a single one-megaton device should be reason enough to stop us in our tracks.

Let’s boil this down to a series of scenarios:

1) Saddam has no WMD’s.

This scenario suggests that the threat posed by Saddam is greatly diminished. We can attack without the fear of nuclear retaliation on the continental U.S. However, can and should are two very different viewpoints.

Without nukes, the threat is greatly diminished, and reasons to overthrow him will seem bullish, even though he is almost certainly in the process of developing them. We can say fuck the politics of keeping foreign relations with other members of the UN on good terms, as when they need our financial support, they will forget all about whatever grudges they hold against us for the actions we take in Iraq in the coming months. But this bold stance will cause increased hatred of America, and certainly give would-be terrorists all the more reason to take action against us.

2) Saddam has WMD’s, but will only strike with them as a last resort (which is of course our position as well).

This scenario suggest that we NOT attack at all, establish the peaceful stalemate (more details above).

3) Saddam has WMD’s, will only strike with them as a last resort, but is in negotiations with Al Qaeda or equivalent terrorist organizations for distribution of WMD’s, that will use them willingly on the U.S.

This scenario suggests that we intervene to prevent the transfer of nukes onto those more willing and likely to use them against us without provocation. However, we must tread very cautiously here, or else we will back Saddam into a corner, and prompt nuclear retaliation.

4) Saddam has WMD’s, and will use them willingly on the U.S.

Kick the crap out of Saddam ASAP!

I am not (as I can not) taking into consideration of the respective probabilities of each of these four possible scenarios (e.g. scenario 2 is more likely than scenario 1). If I am leaving any out, please feel free to correct me. However, taking each at face value, and each being a very possible scenario, we have only one scenario that calls for war on Iraq. If I may, this scenario is one that IMO has less than 10% chance of being the case (seems completely logical that Saddam would rather leave us alone and stay in power, rather than kill a few million Americans, and seal his own fate in the process). Two scenarios call for stepping up our intervention in Iraqi military affairs, both dictating that we do so gingerly (one for political reasons – which, as mentioned above will not do irreparable harm if we choose to ignore them – and one for self-preservation). One calls to leave Iraq be. And this seems the most likely scenario to me, by a reasonable margin.

Now, please bear with me for a minute here – this is speculation. What is also unclear is our capabilities of thwarting a deployed nuclear weapon. Maybe we’ve got jack shit, and we’re sitting ducks in the event of a nuclear assault. But given the formidable technology we showcased in Afghanistan, and the history of the Reagan and then the first Bush administration in “star wars” countermeasures for WMD’s, I’m thinking that Bush may know something we don’t know. Otherwise, if he’s rearing to go kick some Saddam ass, and if SH just so happens to have a couple WMD’s fixed in on some undisclosed (but obvious enough) targets here on the east coast, then Bush is a crazed cowboy with a death wish – and he’s not afraid of taking a few million Americans down with him (sound like somebody else we know?).

I’d like to believe that this is not Bush’s agenda. If we do have the necessary countermeasures to evade a WMD once launched, all bets are off, and Bush can pretty much do whatever the fuck he pleases. I wouldn’t be surprised if we do have the said countermeasures in place and ready to rock, as so much of the military technology we have is applicable to these kinds of defense systems. But, defense systems are not fool proof. I know I wouldn’t want to allow the lives of a few million Americans to be dependent on a last resort defense system that just might not work. Try to think about how many other multi-million and billion dollar projects – funded by taxpayers like us - we’ve put together that didn’t work. A huge recall on F-16 fighters, the space shuttle Challenger, and “corrective lenses” for the Hubbell telescope come to mind, right off the top of my head.

JD - I'd have to say that Bush not inspiring confidence for some is the same way I felt dread when Clinton took the white house and the relief I felt when he left. I think your supposition that terrorists will become more embolden if we attack Iraq is flawed. Other then eliminating a state sponsor of terrorism, we’d also have another representative government (Israel being the only other one) in the Middle East. That would be a very stabilizing thing. People in that form of government regardless of the level of socialism (which I also despise at high levels) are much better off in just about every way imaginable.

Also, treating Iraq as we did the Soviet Union is an apples to oranges comparison. Iraq has been isolated for ten years. The UN doesn’t have the balls to back up its own declarations against Iraq and only shows backbone (spindly one at that) to its strongest financial, military and humanitarian member. The US can go it alone and the rest of the world can piss and moan about it. Are they going to come and attack us? Are the folks in New Zealand who don’t like it going to become terrorists because of it? Hardly.

Something that’s been pointed out a few times bears repeating. Poverty does not spawn terrorists. People are making that claim but the facts do not back them up. For every terrorist you can identify as coming from a poor family, I can point to one that came from a middle class to affluent one. Not only that, I can point to the other 2 billion people who are what we consider poor who are not terrorists. Using the logic that poverty causes terrorists, several hundred million Chinese and Indians should be strapping dynamite to themselves at this very moment.













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I am sure all will be fine. both sides are scared.