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UNDILAH PAS DAN BARISAN ALTERNATIF
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By William Raspberry
Monday, September 30, 2002; Page A19
Larry Williams, a retired Marine colonel now teaching
at George Washington University, has a few questions
he'd like to ask his commander in chief. They aren't
smart-aleck questions -- this is a serious military
man, whose service included stints in Vietnam and
Lebanon.
And though his questions may seem obvious, I think
you'll be struck by how few of them the president has
answered -- perhaps, as Williams says, even for
himself. Here they are, abridged from his recent open
letter to President Bush and elaborated in an
interview:
What is the actual threat to the United States -- the
purpose of war?
Chemical and biological weapons, Williams argues, are
not weapons of mass destruction. "They are very
inefficient and unpredictable and hard to use
effectively. Casualty-producing, yes, but not on a
large scale."
Says Williams: "Even if the Iraqis make a nuclear
device -- which also concerns me -- what would they do
with it? The Mideast region is not alarmed. Why are we
-- thousands of miles away -- alarmed to the degree of
war?"
How many American lives will we expend to punish
Saddam Hussein?
Baghdad has nearly 5 million residents. It is
reasonable to expect that many would see America not
as a liberator but as an invader -- and that many of
these would see our military as at least as great a
threat as Hussein. "If," says the professor, "one
million of them resist an American invasion in
street-to-street resistance -- under a local threat of
chemical and/or biological weapons -- how many
Americans will die?"
How long will public support last when hundreds,
possibly thousands, of body bags start arriving home?
"Desert Storm and Afghanistan make war look so easy,
with so few casualties. When support at home wanes,
how will you turn back the clock?"
How, militarily, do you plan to fight this war?
The Army is too "heavy" to get there short of a Desert
Storm-style buildup. Air power and advanced technology
get you little in the fight to conquer cities.
How many Iraqi citizens do you plan to kill in order
to bestow democracy?
"You can't level cities by bombing, as in World War
II. When newspapers and TV broadcasts around the world
start to show pictures of Iraqi mothers carrying
babies dead from U.S. bombs -- pictures real or
staged, it doesn't matter -- the world will be
inflamed in anti-American sentiment, and U.S. public
support will dissolve."
How will you govern a defeated Iraq?
"Of course, a military victory is as assured as it was
at the outset of Desert Storm. But then, how will you
govern a country probably still resisting through
guerrilla activity and in which we do not speak the
language? Will your military forces be confined to
cantonments at night because they do not control the
streets of Baghdad?"
How does the war against Iraq contribute to winning
the war against terrorism?
"The origin of the attacks of 9/11 and the preceding
chain of attacks against the embassy in Beirut and the
Marine barracks in 1983 and other embassies thereafter
were in the Arab/Muslim world. Victory in the war
against terrorism must necessarily be found in that
worldwide presence. How does alienating every facet of
that world contribute to victory in the current war on
terrorism?"
Williams, a career Marine who insists that his
thoughts are his and not to be linked to George
Washington University, says he learned in Beirut and
South Vietnam that his government didn't always have
better information than he had -- not because
officials lied but because critical details were
filtered out as communiques made their way up the
chain of command. "That experience," he said,
"convinced me that the most senior leadership does not
always have the best counsel."
He then offers Bush his own bit of counsel: "As
president and commander in chief, you clearly have it
in your power to move a reluctant nation toward war.
But if war is too important to be left to generals, it
is also too fraught with unforeseeable catastrophe to
be left to the personal whim of one man. Please, sir,
ask yourself my questions -- and make certain you have
the answers right."
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