Posted on 09/16/2002 6:19:32 PM PDT by What Is Ain't
WAR with an intransigent dictator is easy. Reasonable demands are made and rejected; patience is demonstrated, then exhausted. After a few years, it is not easy to prove the case for an attack.
Until last night, Saddam Hussein was the perfect enemy. He was rejecting the very idea of compromise, ignoring the pleas of his own Arab allies. Now, he has moved, offering the return of weapons inspectors without condition.
But this is no surrender. Last night, Saddam sidestepped the West and struck at the fault line of George Bush’s fragile coalition for war.
Saddam is one of the world’s most enduring dictators, and he owes his survival to this tactic. He will hold out until the last possible moment rather than just allow the weapons inspectors to come in.
He then plays a protracted game of cat-and-mouse with the inspectors, who are looking for tiny concrete wells in a vast country. When they get close, he obstructs them. They claim they cannot do their job properly and hostile relations resume.
Crucially, this whole process takes months. If weapons inspectors return tomorrow, it could buy Saddam a year of time before it can be proved, to UN standards of evidence, that he is preventing them from doing their job.
And weapons inspecting is a painfully slow task. The first inspectors took three years to uncover Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons programme – and then, only after a tip-off from his defecting son-in-law.
Rolf Ekeus, a former inspector, said Saddam has kept building his arsenal while inspectors have been on the ground.
“In 1995, we found out about missile guidance systems Saddam had smuggled in from Russia the same year – even as inspections were going on,” he said last week.
This is why neither Mr Bush or Tony Blair will be content with the simple re-admission of arms inspectors.
This is the crucial divide between the US/UK and the other countries who have been slowly coming round in the last two weeks in New York.
The newcomers, and certainly the Arab states, may settle for weapons inspectors. The US and the UK will not. For the US, weapons inspectors are just the starting point. It is not – and never has been – the goal of Mr Bush to return weapons inspectors to Iraq. The US government is committed to regime change in Iraq, and has been since Bill Clinton signed an order stating this in 1998.
The US’s patience with Saddam snapped just before Operation Desert Fox.
Last night’s offer from Iraq did not astonish the Bush administration. They had been expecting such an offer; the only surprise was the timing.
What Mr Bush badly needed was for Saddam to have been an intransigent dictator for just a few days longer. The plan was to agree a UN Security Council resolution, drafted by Britain and demanding the readmitting of weapons inspectors on the so-called Martini criteria: any time, any place, anywhere.
Any breach of these conditions, the US hoped the resolution would continue, will invite military action. This was just about as far as Mr Bush could get with his coalition of the willing, reluctant and muted. Once this was passed, an attack could start at the slightest resistance from Iraq, without the need for a fresh UN mandate.
Last night’s offer has thrown this entire plan into disarray. The lowest common denominator – weapons inspectors – has been removed from the table.
Mr Bush was never going to settle for such a small demand, and last night, Saddam called his bluff. His only chance is to go higher and work his way up to the rest of the five demands he laid out last week.
One called for Saddam to dismantle the complex, £1.4 billion-a-year illicit trade network immediately. This is impossible to do. But Mr Bush intends to demand the impossible.
Saddam has, once again, showed why he is the West’s most enduring enemy.
I agreed with you until this last statement.
Our 'revolver' is nuclear, and it should have been used on 9/12/2001.
--Boris
MJY wants to know your opinion :-)
Edwards might be like a chicken with the "delirium tremens". The point of the UN speech is to put the President's critics, both foreign and domestic, into a lose-lose situation. If the UN drags its feet or obfuscates, we're going into Iraq. If the UN complies, Saddam the megalomaniac is pathologically incapable of compliance, and we are going into Iraq.
Hussein will never surrender (unless perhaps to be the power behind Qusay Hussein's throne), as he believes he is the reincarnation to Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, and is predestined to sack Jerusalem as they did before him. Think of Hitler in the bunker, willing to sacrifice all of Germany for their unworthiness of his leadership. Scorched earth. Such is the vanity of Saddam.
Hussein's been gunning for this moment for decades, he is evil, and will not change.
There will be war in Iraq. Iraqi WMD-tipped SCUDs will hit Israel. Israel will respond, perhaps with WMDs themselves. They can't sit on the sidelines this time, and can't easily take a WMD hit with only a conventional response. Their security and reputation would be forever compromised.
I believe it's likely that not only US forces, but the US mainland will take WMD hits as well, probably biological, quite possibly smallpox. Anthrax is bad, but short-term, not especially contagious, and no good for starting a plague. I don't believe blind specualtion has led the President to order the stockpiling of 300,000,000 doses of smallpox vaccine by the CDC, or similar stockpiling by Britain and Israel. We know from defectors that Iraq obtained smallpox from former Soviet weapons labs in the 1990s.
I think this because I also believe strongly that the anthrax letters are of Iraqi origin, and I don't believe it was coincidence or a simple precautionary measure that led Bush and Cheney to start dosing with Cipro on 9/11. Something else happened that day, of which we have no details, that led to this precaution against anthrax. The publicized letters were intended to let us know that our enemies are capable of launching a WMD attack on our soil. They are the knife we woke up to find at our throat in the aftermath of the Boijinka attacks of 9/11. I believe that anthrax is just a taste of what Saddam has.
I believe that all hell is gong to break lose within the next few new moons.
Jordan will pitch their tent with us, but will they stay with us when Israel enters the war? What of the 70% "palestinian" majority there if they do?
Will the House of Saud survive? Maybe.
Will Mubarak keep Egypt out? Will he survive? Maybe. Dittoes for Assad Jr. in Syria.
What happens in Iran, India, and Pakistan in the course of this is anyone's guess.
I also believe that we and our allies will ultimately prevail, but barring miracles, I believe that the world will be far more changed by this war than it was by September 11th.
PS. Keep an eye on Taiwan. If we bog down, the Red Chinese are opportunists.
I could see Saddam lunching his last scuds armed with Chem and Bio's at Israel or on our troops when he see's baghdad surrounded. On the other hand I really have a hard time believing he will sign his own death certificate. My guess he will surrender and live in a cell next Manuel Noriega with the guarentee of his own personal mirror for his cell.
Saddam has no friends in the region, he has proven he can't be trusted.
He doesn't need friends, he has Arabs and Moslems.
He has Arafat. None of them can be trusted.
I believe if this is handled correctly, we might see a significant chance for peace in that part of the middle east. In time I feel we will see Arafat ousted by his own. Even Ray Charles can see that Arafat has made things worse not better. All the Palestinians need is someone to lead them in the right direction and the radicals will die off.
I truly believe we might see this happen in the next ten years, Providing we don't allow Iraq to get a hold of a Nuke, The key is removing Saddam IMHO
I've been thinking about your PS for quite some time now. After all this radical Islam junk is cleaned up, the Reds will be our remaining foe.
The Iranian mullahs might not survive their students, true.
But all Saddam has to do is draw Israel into the war, and every other equation changes. I'll bet your Iraqi and Iranian customers believe Mohammed went to heaven from the Temple Mount, where the Al Aqsa Mosque is, when he never actually set foot there.
Arafat is just a symptom, the problem is Islam.
Also, no peace based on Israel giving up part of the Promised Land can ever last. It's been true since the time of Joshua, just as it has been throughout the 20th Century.
After that, it's a toss-up between Latin America and Europe. So much envy.
And there's always Russia.
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