[tsomer]

Chris, I've followed your remarks for some time and you seem to know what you're talking about. I think we and the press wish to see Dub invade Iraq because we want to see Bush Senior's job completed. There's a nice poetic ring to the thought of Dub completing what we now think the old man should have done. And I have no doubt that Dub wants to do it too. But that's no reason to invade. Neither Bush is responsible for Clintoon's 8 years of neglect.

I've been wondering if the administration is backing off because they've decided, measured against what is currently over there, Sadam is not so bad afterall. I've always wondered about Sadam's stupidity in invading Kuwait, and known that he's brutal and cultivated a cultic adherence among his followers etc, but he has survived & he probably wouldn't have had he been nice.

Who would we replace Sadam with? What happens between the Sunni ruling class and the Shiite majority, and how will this effect the possibility of moderate reform in Iran? As to the tribal minorities inhabiting the mountains in that region (I can't remember their names), can we be sure that those societies haven't been subverted by Al Qaeda style Islamists? Some might say give the region to Turkey; my wife is Armenian so you can understand my misgivings there.

In short, seems to me we're considering changing a known evil for a different, unknown and possibly worse evil. What are your thoughts?

[ThePythonicCow]

I'm not section9, but I think it's more than just "finishing the work of the Father". We need to start breaking down the entrenched terrorist supporting nations. They will continue to kill, within increasing efficiency (perhaps dramatically increasing, with weapons of mass destruction). We don't need to take them all down at once. Each one we take down will change the dynamics of the remaining, and at some point, the remaining regimes supporting terrorism will collapse. But until that point, one by one, they must go. Iraq is next.

[section9]

I disagree.

Saddam Hussein is a psychological bad-actor. The sad thing is, he has access to petrodollars and the weapons research that flow from them. Hussein is motivated by revenge, and the chance that he could go down in history as a latter-day Sahal-a-din is too much for him to ignore.

So you build a small bomb, say five to fifteen kilotons, and you give it to al-Qaeda, who are messianic enough to actually not be deterred from acting on your revenge.

The prospect of Baghdad being turned into a nuclear cinder pile would not alter Hussein's historical sense of mission one whit. After all, he knows the Arab Street, and he knows that he and bin Laden would go down in history as Arab heroes who brought low the arrogant Christians. What is one's life, or the lives of millions, compared to that legacy, eh?

Nope, I'm fully convinced that Bush is aware of the danger, and I am fully convinced that Bush intends to unseat, retire, or otherwise place into suspended animation Saddam al-Hussein. It's actually a good thing that if this leak is only partly true, the Pentagon is thinking in terms of covering all bases: perhaps up to 200,000 guys to handle all the contingencies plus LOTS o' airpower. I don't think the uniformed military is trying to spook Bush into cancelling an invasion altogether. I do believe that they are telling him that Iraq and Afghanistan are two different things entirely. There's another factor:

You have to throw in the entire Israeli Air Force and perhaps several divisions of the IDF keeping our Syrian friends busy. The Israelis will want to sit at the top table at the Peace Conference, just like the Russians and the Brits, so they'll make their down payment in blood money, so to speak. The Russians will want guarantees on their eight billion dollars, plus a say in oil development, and the Brits will want their own "occuaption reward" in exploration rights for BP, plus a free trade agreement between the "Federal Republic of Iraq" and the UK.

We'll be so generous that we'll allow the EU to do the catering. It'll bring a whole new meaning to the term "frog's legs".

What kills me is that this is an interagency leak. Someone from State was sitting in on it and got the gist of the conference to Powell, and Powell decided to leak again. That's what pisses me off. Or it's someone lower down on the food chain who's doing it because Powell can't be compromised. The Pentagon didn't leak this. State did.

Be Seeing You,

Chris