Michael, The NY Times reports that the US was considering Iraq as early as 9/13/01. You seem to somehow imagine that Bush including Iraq in the "axis of evil" in January somehow was not a clear signal that the US intended to effect regime change in Iraq. Yet, by Presidents Day 2002, again while Bush's aproval ratings were still high, the Washington Post reporter, albeit incorrectly, that the Administration had made the decision to attack Iraq in May of 2002. Although this report was inaccurate, the fact that the decision was well enough under discussion for the Post to speculate on the timing of the attack shows that this decision was not made under short-orders due to a termporary down-turn in the polls as you suggest.
As for your contention that the only usable intelligence is intelligence that we know is 100% true - well, that contention simply does not comport with reality. Life is full of judgement calls due to imperfect data, Michael, sometimes you're right, sometimes your wrong - but almost nothing in life is 100% certain. Ralph Nader doesn't wait until he has 100% data to speak out against consumer defects, and the President simply cannot wait until he has 100% data before deciding to act either. As for your argument that liberation of Afghanistan would not have been justified on September 10th, 2001 - well I find it most peculiar to hear the logic of retribution coming from you. The liberation of Afghanistan was justified because it made the Afghan people better off, end story. The liberation of Afghanistan was justified because it prevented Afghanistan from being used as a based of operations for attacks upon us, end story. To argue that the liberation of Afghanistan was justified because the killing of more than 2000 Americans justified killing a large number of Al Qaeda members is a logic that frankly I find disturbing - and let this be clear that this is what you are arguing when you say that retribution is a _necessary_ argument for liberating Afghanistan, without which the others fail. In Iraq, the US had standing authorization by the UNSC from 1990 to use, 'all necessary means to enforce all previous and subsequent resolutions regarding the situation in Iraq.' Iraq signed an agreement wit the US at the end of the 1990-1 Gulf War, which it never ever upheld. Additionally. it is worth noting that UNSC resolution 1441 was passed unanimously by the UNSC in the fall of 2002, and was brought up under the same agenda item as the 'all necessary means' resolution, and indeed, resolution 1441 specifically 'recalled' the 'all necessary means' resolution in its preamble. The harm done in waiting for 4 months-to-a-year is that inspections only resumed after US troops were sent back to the Gulf, and it would have been exceptionally cost prohibitive for the US to leave one out of every 1,000 Americans in the Persian Gulf for that period of time, especially since they would be vulnerable there to terrorist attacks. The US had the legal justification - especially since Iraq never complied with the inspections, so it made the call go in and end the long national nightmare of 38 million Iraqis. I think that it is clear to anyone that nuclear weapons are far more effective killers than biological or chemical weapons. We have protections against biological and chemical weapons - which I might add were distributed to every Israeli citizen. We have no such defense against a nuclear blast. If Iraq developed a nuke, its game over. You claim that there was no intelligence that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program - yet somehow the DPRK managed to build nuclear weapons right underneath our noses, Iran made vast strides in their nuclear program without us ever knowing it, the US was completely surprised by India's and Paksitan's nuclear tests (see any opinion piece calling on George Tenet to resign for evidence), and Iraq came within a year of building a nuclear weapon in 1991 without us knowing it. Sorry Michael, but the absence of evidence is not the absence of evidence...... MOREOVER, the United Nations Security Council agreed unanimously in resolution 1441 that the burden of proof was upon Iraq to demonstrate the dismantling of its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs - and that the burden was not upon the US to demonstrate that those programs still existed. Now, you are free to disagree with the UNSC's unanimously (including Syria I might add) assigning the burden in this case uon Iraq - but you'd be taking a rather extreme position in that case. Sorry Michael, but nuclear weapons are NOT easy to detect. In fact, it is believed that some of them can be made as small as a brief case.... and of course, once they reach a US harbor it is already too late to prevent the incineration of hundreds of thousands. We had EVERY reason to believe that Hussein would try to acquire a nuclear weapon the first chance that he got. To deny that is to deny reality. Morever, given our past track record, we had EVERY reason to believe that the next time Saddam tried, whenever that might be, we might not have the opportunity to stop him. Given that you could eliminate this risk of Saddam Hussein trying to get a nuclear weapon at some time in the future without us knowing, the opportunity to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia where they were becoming recruitment tools for Al Qaeda, and the opportunity to liberate 38 MILLION PEOPLE from one of the most brutal regimes on Earth - and to do it with far less civilian casualties than would have occurred without us invading - what about this decision is there not to like? JDG P.S. looking back at my post, I realized immediately that I made two typos in my UNICEF stat - it shuold have been 5.000 CHILDREN per MONTH. Anyhow, as requested, here is a cite from UNHCR website; http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/ca6871795b392fd349256c4b0002a33e?OpenDo cument 1996 - A UNICEF report states that among children under the age of five, there are 4,500 "excess deaths" every month, primarily attributed to sanctions. 1997 - UNICEF reports that more than 1.2 million people, including 750,000 children under age five, have died due to scarcity of food and medicine. Of those under five, 32 percent -- 960,000 children -- are chronically malnourished, a rise of 72 percent since 1991. An additional 23 percent are underweight. 1998 - World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 5,000 to 6,000 children die every month as a result of the economic sanctions against Iraq. _______________________________________________________ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
