Reductio ad absurdum
Despite all the blather, there is one essential fact. Saddam Hussein cares only about himself. One defector said that the one thing that is in every one of his residences is a biography of Stalin. His absolute priority is his own power and survival. ALL outside observers agree on this paranoic situation. This makes the fundamental premise of the Bush administration completely absurd. Saddam will not strike at us, even if he has WMD. He knows that to do so will mean his death, as a direct cause and effect relationship, within days to weeks of giving the order. This is true no matter how you cut it, even bending and twisting yourself into a pretzel to posit some magical delivery system that's "untraceable". SH knows damned well that (1) we are better at tracing things than his guys may know. (2) he cannot rely upon agents that he sends out, since most of the agents that he dispatches DEFECT! (look it up.) (3) Any truly 'untraceable WMD attack on American soil will be presumptively blamed on him anyway. For these three reasons, the whole notion that we must do a fast NOW! preemptive strike is patently absurd. If SH has WMD, he has one use for them, as punishment deterrence to stave off his own death. In other words, he is saving them to use in response to the very thing we're talking about doing. He will not squander this capability lashing out, provoking the one thing in all the world that he does not want to see happen. In fact, I am willing to take that chance. I do want to excise this canker of human evil. When we do excise it, there will be a period of heightened danger from his death-spasm. We need to do it carefully. Not in a spasm of our own, bullying our allies, bribing them with billions$ to reluctantly go along with something that they ALL see as dismally stupid. This whole mania is about people painting enemy caricatures instead of actually trying to look at the motives of the enemy. Again, SH has absolutely no reason to behave in the way that GWB portrays him doing. He has every reason to try to harm us if he sees his ship going down. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
