Posted on 03/21/2002 4:23:50 AM PST by ejdrapes
Mar 21 200
THE discovery by an American president that nuclear weapons can be useful is not as new as some shocked people appear to believe. General MacArthur had eventually to be fired because he thought them too potentially useful in the Korean war.
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon were prepared to use them against Cuba or Vietnam or the Arab states. Even the latest rather candid nuclear "doctrine" can be traced directly to an authorisation made by President Clinton in 1996.
The message is always the same. Take us seriously: we are in principle prepared to destroy you utterly. The problem with such a "stand tall" policy is that it always has to be based upon a bluff.
The warheads are essentially unusable. A superpower looks sillier and less super, each time it rattles this particular sabre. The old problems resurface, just as stubborn as they were before.
During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was emphatically told by Washington that if he unleashed any chemical or biological weapons, his country would be turned into glowing ashes.
But he ended the war as the undisputed leader of Iraq, while American doctors continued to puzzle over the symptoms of malady shown by their soldiers, a malady still known neutrally under the name "Gulf War Syndrome".
As the Bush administration sends Vice-President Cheney around the world to recruit support for another and presumably more conclusive assault upon Iraq, there is a little-noticed controversy taking place back home in Washington DC.
LAST month, Dr Ahmed Chalaby, leader of the Iraqi opposition, was in town. And nobody in the government would agree to meet him.
Indeed, it became plain from making a few inquiries that there was a formal ban on any contact between him and any member of the administration.
If we are to liberate the Iraqi people from the vile despotism of Saddam Hussein, how is this to be done by treating one of that country's leading dissidents as a pariah?
Dr Chalaby's umbrella resistance organisation, the Iraqi National Congress, is the main recipient of the funds allotted by Congress under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed during the Clinton years but never really pursued.
It is said by various Bush bureaucrats that there are some accounting questions about how exactly the money was spent.
But this innuendo, even if founded in truth, cannot possibly be the real reason for official frigidity. Since when has the CIA been choosy about accountancy?
Since when are Kurdish rebels and other fighters supposed to submit immaculate expense accounts? (If only the administration were as high-minded about its former friends at Enron and Arthur Andersen...).
No, behind all this is a dirty political secret, which may, if ignored, lead to a calamity in Mesopotamia.
The awful, undiscussed truth is this. In many ways, the United States quite likes the Saddam regime. It was its best friend and chief financier and supplier during the 80s and the presidency of Bush senior.
Indeed, on that endlessly recalled occasion when Saddam "used chemical weapons on his own people", the Pentagon solemnly and falsely reported that the deadly stuff had come from the Iranian side. (By the way, to refer to the Kurds as Saddam's "own people" is also rather to beg the question. They are not Arabs and many of them wish they were not even Iraqis.)
If Washington were designing a system for Iraq, it would choose a Sunni Muslim military dictatorship, with a strong central government in Baghdad, held in place by a ruthless but secular political party.
THAT is exactly what it now has - except that this ideal regime is headed by a megalomaniac.
So the suspicion must be that the United States really wants, in Dr Chalaby's words, "Saddamism without Saddam".
A rising by the Shi'a majority in the south (Dr Chalaby is a Shi'a) might lead to an Iraq that was more friendly to Iran - which is also a member of the so-called "Axis of Evil".
A rising by the long-suffering Kurds in the North would greatly inconvenience the American client state in Turkey, which eyes restiveness among its own Kurds with great apprehension.
To realise this is to understand why Washington has been denouncing Saddam Hussein as "Hitler" for more than a decade without ever summoning the nerve to depose him.
The difference now is supposed to be made by his frantic efforts to build or to acquire the Weapons of Mass Destruction that deserve their capital letters.
Nor is this a frivolous point: credible defectors have told of serious work on thermo-nuclear bombs - "dirty" ones if you like, as if there could be "clean" ones - and the development of a range of hideous plague devices as well.
IN its current mood, the Bush administration is not prepared to wait and find out whether such an arsenal will be used or not.
It has decided to err on the side of active mistrust and to smash the Iraqi military capacity before it becomes any more sophisticated.
But here another enormous difficulty presents itself. Saddam Hussein has been very quiet of late but if his country were invaded he would very probably unleash at least some horror weapons in the direction of Israel.
(These would run the risk of killing the Palestinians as well, as few people ever bother to point out but it could well be that a desperate dictator would not mind this "collateral damage".)
In other words, an attack upon Iraq might precipitate the very contingency that it is designed to forestall.
I have asked several people in the "national security" world how they reply to this - and they say that the invasion will be so overwhelming that no Iraqi commander will find it worth his while to obey orders from the doomed leader.
Not a completely convincing response.
After all, what would the United States do if that "scenario" didn't work out? Nuke Iraq? Tell the Israelis they were free to nuke Iraq?
Goodbye then to the oilfields and - depending on how the prevailing wind was blowing - goodbye to much else besides.
In the recent tussles with Milosevic and the Taliban, the declared objectives were to halt further self-evident aggression and to emancipate populations held hostage by fanatical regimes.
In both cases, local allies were more than willing to welcome intervention as a liberation.
These favourable conditions do not appear to apply so far in the Iraqi case and, what is worse, the Bush administration does not appear to feel that it owes anybody, including the hostage people, an explanation.
Goodbye to the oilfields? Does this guy understand that if oil was the primary objective we could begin an operation that starts at 6:00am, seize large portions of the oil fields, and be finished before breakfast?
And in 20 years, the US will invade every country in the tropics, because in 20 years all power will be solar, and they get more light in the tropics... It's all about light.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.