"800 Missiles to hit Iraq in First 48 Hours"

I've got mixed feelings about Iraq/U.S. interaction at this point (obviously SOME sort of threat, but is this how we deal with threats? Is it better to ignore a threat or act rashly?), but I sure as hell don't appreciate the moronic "rah-rah" bullshit coming from the Bush administration. They WANT to bomb. It's so blatant, and it's so disgusting.

I just wish they'd get it over with.

Of course by saying 'no safe place in Baghdad' so far ahead of time in the int'l press he is kind of warning any pro-American dissidents to pack up and move to the NNFZ.

From the people* who brought you "We had to destroy the village to save it."

* And certain people who happened not to go to Vietnam as young adults.

If the average iraqi infantryman knows we can do this, is he more or less likely to carry out an order from good ol' friendly Saddam to use WMDs against us?

The speechwriter for the "axis of evil" speech said that the reason he included N. Korea in the axis was because he needed a third member besides Iran and Iraq and that it shouldn't be a Muslim country in order for the axis not to appear anti-Islam. N. Korea was rather pissed at being called evil, and it made bad relations w/ the US even worse, leading to a situation far worse than with Iraq.

But think about what this means. Foreign policy was determined not any cabinet members or foreign policy experts, but by a fucking speechwriter!

Point is it's not as if NK was just arbitrarily picked as an 'evil' country -if anything Kim Jong Il is more terrifying and dangerous dictator than Saddam ever was or could be.

On preview: what Millar said.

Unless you are rooting for US & coalition casualties in the three and four digit range, I think you might agree that 800 cruise missiles is probably about right.

I said just that in my prevoius post that N. Korea is far worse than Iraq. So Millar, why aren't we invading N. Korea again? Cause they might actually put up a fight? What about Pakistan? They make pretty shitty "allies" (I forget the name of it, but the Pakistani version of the CIA are big supporters of the Taliban and are hiding most of the remain uncaptured leaders). Same thing with Saudi Arabia. The fact is, the world is filled with countries we would have reasons to attack, but we pick the weakest, most broken down country of them all. rah rah go america!

In all the years of enforcing the "no fly zones", how many manned planes of our got shot down? Like, zero. We cvould easily just use regular old carbet bombong, but we got to be hi-tech (and expensive)

Utterly destroying civilian infrastructure and creating a massive refugee situation (momentarily accepting that civilians will be out of Baghdad in time) sounds pretty horrible to me.

Well, there you go. We wont fight anyone who might put up a fight. Those lucky countries get the option of diplomacy. All the pitiful, weak countries get regime changes at gunpoint. USA! USA!

Great! I would too but that's little like cheering the Raiders in the fourth and has been since September 2001 or so.

fletrejet, that comment is barely above a troll. I live near DC and I don't necessarily want a dirty bomb, much less a real one, to go off near my home anytime soon. You go on with your bad self.

Yes, the dirty bomb Iraq will build with its non-existent radioactive material. You fall for every government propaganda ploy.

Weren't you the one suggesting that the FAA & the AF may have had something to do with 9/11? I see yr citical thinking skills are well-honed.

Conspiracy or not, at least I am questioning why the most powerful airforce in the world couldn't respond in time to stop four slow-moving commercial airliners hijacked over the period of a few hours (among other things)

The flaw in this argument is that an axis of two wouldn't have seemed in the slightest bit incongruous in a Dubya speech.

Rattling NK's cage was a bad move. Diplomacy appeared to be working there as well. Saddam was caged and cowed. Yet not one senior Al Qu'aida figure has been caught and brought to Justice. Those reponsibe for 11/9 are still either free or unconfirmed dead. As Peter Begren points out Saddam is a Secular Fascist something that Osama Bin LAden hates above even the Al Saud monarchy. He went as far as calling Saddam a bad muslim, possibly the worst insult bin Laden can throw. I do admit that Saddam could find common cause with Osama, but it would take a big leap in mindsets. Saddam is far too paranoid to take up with someone so implacably opposed to him.

What is far more worrying is that, quite possibly, Al Qu'aida could take up with, (and probably already has), Islamist Iraqi opposition and make hell for any new iraqi administration or occupying force.

I can't helping thinking that if you draw a parallel between Baghdad 2003 and London during WW2; the population didn't cave in, call upon Churchill to acquiesce, not rise up against the state. They listened to stirring broadcasts and resolved not to cave in to the aggressor.

The theory seems to be 'they hate Saddam but if we bomb the fuck out of them, it will be the final push to give them the outrage and anger to overthrow him'. Which seems to be on a par with lefties rejoicing in 1979 that Thatcher would push the proletariat into the arms of revolutionary socialism as capitalism in tooth and claw was unleashed on them. There will doubtless be some who make the link - but I'd suggest that the outrage will be directed to the people who fired the cruise missles that killed your loved ones, not Saddam Hussein.

How would you know what my foreign policy is, I haven't discussed anything much beyond the fact that I do not deem Iraq a big enough threat to justify war?

I don't have any "greater grasp" really, but the use of huge numbers of cruise missiles rather than carpet bombing seems to be the kind of thing designed to make job of the officers and leadership impossible. "Morale" is a pretty vague and undefinable thing to try to bomb, but knocking out every phone booth, traffic light, and lightswitch in the country in one day by air would create a logistical mess that no leadership could deal with.

Darkly, I'm pretty "optimistic" about the war in that I think the US military could pull of an invasion and ouster of Saddam's regime. What scares the shit out of me is that it was create a huge, huge wound in world affairs that we will have to keep band-aiding for probably another century, another HUNDRED YEARS of being responsible to the last detail for a fractious country that we have wrecked. The worst-case scenarios for this adventure are as bad as bad gets. cf the "Iraq: the 51st State" piece that ran in the Atlantic a couple months ago.

(As an aside, I can't imagine any Christian account of "just war" which would sanction the sort of targeting of infrastructure which occurred last time around and is planned for this time around. I just received a forwarded e-mail from a distant relative, a first person account of someone who met Bush. It goes on to say how wonderful it is to have a confessing Christian president. Nauseating.)

The Serbs gave up pretty quickly in the Balkan war after the bombing started, but how much this had to due with the bombing vs. other factors is impossible to say. Which is the whole problem of finding cause->effect in something as complex as a country.

Secondly if you look into the actual regulation of material moving into and out of Iraq, you'll find that it's been handled with ridiculous disregard to actual effect and an even more ridiculous devotion to bureacracy: entirely harmless and specifically humanitarian goods have been blocked from entry while a multi-nation UN panel hems and haws over them for no specific reason. Any nation on the panel can veto the delivery of any item to Iraq on whim, and this is precisely what they've done, even with things like medical supplies.

It's one thing to claim that Iraq would have been in a bad position either way -- this is entirely true -- but it's silly to pretend that sanctions do not have a negative effect on a populous: that's the entire point of sanctions. Are you really arguing that we devoted years of effort to sanctions that had a negligible military effect but gave Saddam an ideal excuse for his own misadministration? (If so, wouldn't that simply be a case of actively abeting the continuing ruin of that nation?) And if sanctions were not harmful to the Iraqi public but kept Saddam from rearming, weren't they in effect "successful," thus raising the question of why we're abandoning them as an avenue?

all people from the western world = Russia, China, France & Germany?

in the Middle East generally = Vietnam, Japan?

Unless you're talking about buying oil and selling arms.

Sanctions have kept Saddam from rebuilding a substantial military, but they cannot keep him from developing weapons of mass destruction because they are not perfect and cannot absolutely contain or control the system. Things get smuggled in. Sanctions and inspections cannot work as long as Saddam resists them. They aren't supposed to. He agreed to them but has never cooperated sufficiently.

the point is we've tried everything but the fucker won't keep his promises. He's dangerous and untrustworthy and he's holding up the war on terrorism so he has to go.

This time they will hate America because we plan to actually kill the tyrant and stay for a while?

And like Afghanistan they will display this anger by, er, opening record shops?

Afghanistan is the perfect example of what 180 years of non colonial Western Meddling can do to a country. The British, Russians, Soviets and Americans all have culpability. I don't doubt Afghanistan will eventually sort itself out, I reckon eventually it will end up in the same uneasy state as Iran. An democracy, Islamic in character, but held back by a fundamentalist claque at the centre. At the moment though Afghanistan is still in the same mess as it was in '89 or '99. the government barely has control over kabul and the rest of the country is lawless under the control of disparate warlords.

Trying to assassinate Hamid Karzai != being pissed at America

(counter-argument galloping up behind me as I type this: "not directly, but it does reflect extreme displeasure with the colonialist policies of American yada yada boop boop killing people is bad")

You also didn't answer the second question, really: what bearing exactly does that have on the present? You offer up a pretty weak set of reasons to get rid of Saddam, really: he's a bad administrator? So are half of the leaders of half of the governments in the entire world; you want to see people mismanage resources even apart from sanctions and plenty of African nations will provide you with a show for the ages. He's "holding up the war on terrorism" -- in what way, particularly given that it's a "war" in which he's never pledged to be an ally and can't particularly be demonstrated to have been very notable an enemy? Sanctions can't stop him from developing weapons of mass destruction? When was this decided? At that convenient point where we were getting started toppling regimes anyway?

All of which still doesn't address the actual problem I have with your game plan, which remains: what happens after Saddam? Until someone can answer this question making specific reference to various religious and ethnic minorities, the chances of cooperation between various opposition factions, and the burning question of what's looking a lot like Kurdistan, I don't think I can listen to him or her talk about how Saddam needs to go. (Unless you think a runaway car steers itself better than a bad driver.)

Next: I'm arguing on and on about sanctions because many anti-war people seem to like arguing that "first we starved their babies, now we want to bomb them with 800 cruise missiles". Neither of which is true. *The United States is not responsible for Saddam refusing to feed his own people with food we've sold him*.

As far as "stop hitting yourself" goes, he lost the war, he agreed to the terms, he refuses to abide by them. He's basically resisting arrest, which is not a valid reason to take the cuffs off.

He's holding up the war on terrorism because you're going to liberate the Arabs and bring them into the 21st century then Iraq is the place to start.

Sanctions weren't supposed to stop him from developing weapons of mass destruction. Weapons Inspectors were. He was supposed to disarm in front of them and show them where he'd been hiding everything - this is what he agreed to do - and he hasn't done any of it. Their job was never to find the weapons like a big easter egg hunt and disarm iraq all by themselves, they were just supposed to verify that Saddam was doing this. He never has, never did, never cooperated, always lied, always hid, always diverted, and always continued with his WMD programs as hard has he could.

It was decided that we were getting really tired of fucking with him on the morning of Sept 11th.

What happens after Saddam: Military Government. We administrate the reform of Iraq into a free capitalist liberal democracy over a number of decades, funnelling oil revenues into rebuilding infrastructure and all that good stuff. Do you want step by step instructions? I don't have them, it's not what I do, but that's the idea. Nobody's talking about it because if Bush came out and said "we're gonna set up this government that's gonna be free and successful and none of this state-run media and no brainwashing" then the Sauds and the mullahs - who are at the heart of terrorism and irrational hatred of the west as a scapegoat for their own failings - start looking around and getting antsy.

There are no magic bullets, there never will be. This isn't a point worth arguing. We're still in Afghanistan, we're still training a coalition afghan defense force, we're still sending hundreds of millions of dollars in food and humanitarian aid there every year. What do you want?

The Taliban, given time, might have unified the country in a coherent central government. This is a first step to democracy. Unfortunately, it directly supported terrorism, so it had to go. This set back Afghastinan for decades. If we wanted democracy faster in Afghanistan, we should never have invaded Afghanistan, but like I said, that was not an option for the US.

All the US can do there now is prop up some puppet ruler and pray he holds power, or basically make afghanistan the 51st state, give it a military governor, invest massive amounts of money in infrastructure, etc etc, and even then it would takes years before anything good came from it. I am not surprised which choice the US made.

don't fly off the hadle here and dare think for a second that I am justifying terrorism, stuart - but, they do have a few reasons for not having the u.s. on their christmas card list.

I have to admire Stuart for arguing so strongly on these points without really knowing how things will turn out - I'm clued in on things so I'm actually grounded in fact, even if I can't tell you guys any of it.

Stuart -props!

Quite frankly we need to just stop meddling, just trying to impose our values on people. Iran and Turkey stand up as shining examples of what happens in muslim nations if you more or less just leave them be. Neither is perfect but are our own democracies that perfect: Bush got voted in on fewer votes than Gore; Blair has power way surpassing his mandates; I could provide more examples but thats just the way our electoral systems work.

We need to stop seeing the middle east as a series of problems that need solving and we should stop seeing it as a game of geopolitics. It is about people. People who we have aided in the oppression of betrayed and abused over the 80 odd years since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Balfour, Sikes-Picot we are still reviled for these acts and they happened during the first world war. We imposed the borders, the monarchy's to satisfy western geopolitical needs. Sphere's of influence, zones of control we need to abandon these and start treating the people of the middle east as people and quite frankly we should let them sort it out for themselves. We should decline to support oppressive undemocratic regimes and help those that are making the transition to democracy. Furthermore if we wish to achieve this we have to reduce western dependence on crude oil and thus on this unstable region.

The one caveat is that we must apply pressure on Israel to dismantle its apartheid regime. Israel is the creation of the guilt of the west and its form comes from the collapse of British interest through exhaustion in this strip of eastern Mediterranean desert. We will have to take on Israel as we took on South Africa and hopefully a leader of the stature of Mandela or Sislu will emerge over time. Many of founders of Israel never envisaged a state where the muslims were driven out, some did and their army and terrorists that drove out the Palestinians. Many of Israel's problems stem from the fact that Britain just gave upand left rather than oversaw a peaceful transition. Just as they had in India and Ireland before they saw partition as the solution rather than something to be avoided.

(That was rather an aside)

I do believe that we cannot impartially intervene militarily in the middle east so we should just leave it and try and provoke learning, liberal values and assist in any way we can.

Because Stuart trusts the Bush regime, and the Bush regime says it has evidence of a connection. It has refused to reveal this evidence until this week when it announced it would be revealed next week, so we'll see. But until then, the Bush regime has done pretty much everything it could to earn the distrust of its people. A recent poll found that about 50% of Americans trust the UN more than Dubya concernign Iraq, which is quite pathetic for a president trying to lead a country into war.

and ed, you've just stated everything i wanted to but was too lazy to type. keep on rockin in the free world!

(b) With sanctions, your focussing of blame on Saddam only underscores the point the million-Iraq-babies brigade have been trying to make for the past however many years: that our approach to Saddam was part and parcel of the deterioration of the quality of life of the average non-Kurd non-Shiite Iraqi citizen, and to no great apparent benefit to anyone just yet. Saying, basically, that Saddam "started it" and could end if if he wanted do did not in fact help those citizens; likewise, the argument being made against bombing is that, provoked by Saddam or not, the U.S. will have participated in the destructions of the environment of Iraq in several of its own ways, and that we should be massively sure that the payoff is worth it before we get started. This is not a bizarre argument to make: it's a simple balancing of gains versus loss of life and resources to innocent bystanders, and those on about the babies just happen to have a difference take on that balance than you apparently do.

(c) Beyond all of that your rhetoric is exactly what frightens people not about this particular situation but the general posture the U.S. has adopted within it. You speak as if it's the Bush administration's particular role on Earth to make, enforce, and administer whatever course of action it deems beneficial to anyone, in any nation, anywhere, based on some invisible moral authority that supercedes the wishes of the majority of U.S. citizens and the majority of people around the world. This is, quite simply put, fucking scary: whether it works out okay this time or not, it's disturbing to see a small cadre of men -- many of them previously responsible for abeting atrocities as bad as Saddam's, if not worse -- making such decisions, weilding the world's most powerful military, and explicitly without responsibility to anyone else at all, not even their own citizens. Your rhetoric is almost worse: note, for instance, how massively you expanded "war on terrorism" to mean not a fight against actual terrorists but a crusade to bring secular capitalist democracies to the entire Muslim world (all your words). The question at this point becomes not whether any given U.S. action is a good idea, but rather what gives this particular group of men the authority to make such decisions themselves.

(d) By the way, that's a giant cop-out on the issue of suitable replacements for the old regime: "we'll just annex them," you're basically saying, "and I'm sure something will work out." Leaving alone what a horrible long-term idea that is even for our personal freedom-from-terrorism purposes, it ignores every substantive question raised by ousting Saddam (e.g. a nascent Kurdistan?).

b) Saying Saddam started it and could finish it if he wanted to is the truth, whether it helps anybody or not. We've established the protocol and the infrastructure, and he won't let us feed his people. He's decided to hold his own people hostage to our sense of morality, but it's not going to work. Now what's this about destroying the environment of Iraq?

c) Sixteen months ago the terrorists declared open war on the West. For a long time, there was terrorism but compared to 9/11 it was low-level stuff and it occurred far from home. Now it's war, it's big, it's at home, and we're fighting to win. We didn't jump into WW2 until Pearl Harbor. We've been fighting terrorism for decades but we didn't jump in until 9/11. It is not the case that the Bush administration has all of a sudden decided to take over (much less *start*) the fight and do whatever it wants anywhere on earth. Those directly involved in fighting terrorism and Islamist militants pre-9/11 either weren't winning or they've been complicit all along in its continuation. We ain't having it. All your "small cadre of men… without responsibility to anyone" is paranoid. Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin seemed to pull off World War II all right. Bush hasn't rounded up all the Muslims. He hasn't suspended elections or executed ANSWER activists. And shit we don't even have a Stalin this time around. I agree that the situation is scary and unpredictable and there are no absolute certain easy answer guarantees, but that's not new, and there's no use hiding from it and pretending it will go away.

d) Sorry I haven't gotten around to writing the new Iraqi constitution yet. What do you want? What is your point? Iraqis won't get along so we might as well give up? They're not broken. They're not inferior. They're human beings. They can learn.

I would propose that the U.S. and Western countries provide the funds and so forth, but that the actual restructering (spelling?) be put into the hands of a coalition of Middle Eastern countries, most notably Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia - that is, the more western-friendly nations, who would likely be willing to work with the U.N. in the rebuilding process, thereby increasing the odds that long-term Iraq will emerge as a democracy, or at least not led by a dictator or an intollerant religious group or tribal leaders. (Wow, sorry for the length of that sentence.)

I can easily see how the people of the Middle East, regardless of religious orientation or country of citizenship, would view a move by the U.S. and Britain against one of their neighbors in a negative manner. And many, especially the extremists (and not just the Islamic extremists - other religious groups have their fringe believers, too), will see such a move as another reason to move against the West. But if it is possible to have the situation either ended by Middle Easterners or at least dampered a bit by their support and willingness to help in the rebuilding efforts, then I think that the long-term prospects for the country look brighter than if the U.S. stays and dictates the behavior of people from a very different (and in some cases, very difficult to comprehend) culture.

What's more the best way of fighting Islamic terro is by trying to find some kind of understanding between out two cultures and by helping the oppressed people of the muslim world to throw off their shackles. Is it any coincidence that the most developed muslim nations have the lowest numbers of extremists.

No way should the restructuring be left to Iraqs neighbors, these a the key problem in the region, corrupt monarchies that prop themselves up by placating extreme forms of islam by giving them control over religions affairs, (the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia for starters). Saudi Arabia is even named after the ruling family. Rebuilding Iraq should be firmly in the hands of iraqis

How about we get to Haiti after the people who blow themselves up to kill us are out of the way?

You're also still massively distorting the truth about the sanctions system (ask Joy Gordon) and massively underestimating the potential of human beings to not like the countries occupied by foreign powers (have you forgotten that one of the biggest rhetorical goals of Islamist terrorists is to get U.S. installations out of the holy land? or that a significant portion of their hatred for the Saudi monarchy is based on the Saud family climbing in bed with the U.S. and allowing that?)

Your 9/11 history is also a little bit bullshit: you seem to forget that someone already tried to demolish the World Trade Center, a decade ago. You can't say "this time they're attacking us at home" -- the most you can say is "this time it actually worked." (Also my apologies for forgetting that World War II worked out so wonderfully for everyone: Stalin was a great guy, wasn't he.)

So in conclusion no, I do not want a new Iraqi constitution from you, but my point here has been that no one has yet demonstrated any sort of coherent plan that convinces me that a post-invasion Iraq will necessarily work to the benefit of anyone, anywhere. You're not doing that work, either: all you're saying is "we'll occupy it, it'll be fun, it'll work out just like Japan did." But Japan is a complete aberration in the history of U.S. military guidance of foreign nations -- a complete aberration -- and people here have pointed out a great number of reasons Iraq is a billion times bigger a challenge, none of which you've responded to at all.

And mostly, Stuart, I'm mystified that you can be so glibly confident in the ability of U.S. military occupation to make things better, when -- apart from a few isolated examples like Japan and maybe Panama and so on -- careful examination of history should assure us that there is no such guarantee, none whatsoever. If you want immediate evidence just look at the guy you're so keen on ousting: you are putting your trust in a government that at one point decided it would be a great idea to arm and support him!

I've already stated that no one has demonstrated a coherent plan for long term goals in Iraq because it would make the leadership of the rest of the region all panicky. "You Islamists hate our culture and want us out, so guess what, we're gonna slowly but surely remodel your whole world to more closely resembly ours and this is how," would not go over well in Riyadh.

Bit hard to do that in a theocracy like Saudi Arabia clamping down on corrupting influences from the outside world, I have to note. I actually think the pressures would be even greater in (non-Arab) Iran were it not for the fact that it really is becoming an Islamic republic year by year and that Western influence is pretty well entrenched if not encouraged -- the end game of that particular religious elite to try and cling to power will be interesting indeed. But it wouldn't have been so problematic if Iran hadn't been lumped into the 'axis of etc.'

Maybe I'm overstating this, but it's worth saying again: What makes you think that what we have in North America is what people in other parts of the world, with different cultural backgrounds, would want? I mentioned A.O.Neville upthread but nobody bit: this idead that you/we know what's best for the world and will impose it on them, whether they like it or not, is just plain fucking scary.

(have to find again this art. by a ultra-con freemarketeer that was anti-war. Made good argts that war /= prosperity, quite the opposite as violence inhibits personal and market freedom and massive resources are directed towards destruction of...massive resources [duh]. Then made batty argument that free mkt would sort out Iraq peacefully no prob, but in the heretical way that profit and ownership had to be Iraqi & not US directed.)

(incidentally nabisco I liked your response to my earlier post about the "huge wound" metaphor ie "we're already tending it." History being the constant layering and shifting countless overlapping "wounds" and the tending or deepening thereof.)