20,000 soldiers is a hell of a lot, and the US has
more urgent/important things to do ...
The message was that the Iraqi government had some weaponised anthrax
and radio-active materials, both of which would cause a great deal of
trouble if released in Washington, DC or London, England.
If Bush was not lying, gathering that material was highly urgent and
important. One fear is that is would fall into hands less deterable
than that of the Iraqi government.
Also, some 466000 coalition troops were involved (most for logistics,
operating ships at sea, repairing trucks and airplanes, and the like).
I am talking about shifting the task of fewer than 5% of the total
troop number for a short time. Moreover, if the army had needed
another 20000 troops, Bush could have delayed the start a little
longer to wait for them and their equipment to arrive.
But my main question is why you think that dealing with the threat of
an anthrax or radio dusting attack on some west European city (easier
to get to than the US) or an attack on the US (coming in through
Mexico, perhaps) is not very `urgent/important'?
Incidentally, today's BBC news, 2003 May 31
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/2951440.stm
says the following:
The Pentagon has a list of around 900 sites which may provide clues to
Saddam Hussein's alleged chemical and biological arsenal. So far,
around 200 locations have been searched, said Pentagon officials on
Friday.
That means that so far the US has not searched 700 sites whose
location the US knows about. Most likely most of those 700 locations
will be empty or clueless. Who thinks the US intelligence services
know much?
But suppose one of those sites contained enough weaponized anthrax to
fill a Johnson Baby powder container like those that that many grown
up travelers carry? What if someone who is unfriendly to the US and
has the right contacts gets hold of it before a US Army team comes by?
It may be that none of those 700 uninvestigated sites have or had
anything dangerous in them. But the question is what proof can you
offer *now* that no one hostile to the US has visited any of those
sites in the past 6 weeks, and taken something small?
As far as I can see, at this stage, the only response is to say `we
don't know'. And the only hope, for Americans who favor security, can
be that their President was lying before hand on what is generally
considered a national rather than a partisan issue, and incompetent in
his follow through. If you say that Bush was not lying, then you must
admit the chance that sometime in the past 6 weeks, someone hostile to
the US has taken something dangerous from one of the 700
uninvestigated sites.
(I am leaving out of this discussion the issue of additional sites yet
to be specified -- I have no idea what effort the US is putting into
finding them.)
--
Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises
http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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