C-Span Airs Samer Shehata, Arab Studies Program-Acting Director

The Iraq war isn't about oil. It's about overhauling the middle-east. As one caller put it, there's a move on to advance a 'greater Israel' going on here. Only those 'in the know' are aware of it. Obviously he was. Evidently you and I aren't.

Shehata comes off as a moderate, then slips in the inuendo so gracefully that you wind up asking yourself, did he just say that? Notably missing are any questions or answers regarding the evil that middle-eastern leaders perpetrate on their own citizens. You get the impression that his own people are for the most part the only ones calling in. Most of the questions I've heard are softballs tossed so he can hit them out of the park.

C-Span is off to a great start this morning. Shehata is being aired unopposed. Next they'll have an anti-war panel. Then C-Span will air the A.N.S.W.E.R. ralley. What a great line-up for those who love our nation.

As much as I hate what this dimwit and the A.N.S.W.E.R. ralley promote, I hope US citizens watch. They need to see C-Span out itself. Sharon is the problem. All Arab leaders are the moderates. Caller after caller praised Samer for regurgitating his rewrite of history. The Shah of Iran was a very bad guy by the way. He was merely a puppet of the US.

You have to give these folks credit. They take the network your and my cable dollars support, then turn the media tool against us on our own soil.

At 5:45 p.m. e.s.t. a Death Penalty Forum will be addressed by Janet Reno. C-Span will cover it live. It just doesn't get any better than this...

None of us like war. The next to the last thing I want to do is send our troops into harms way. The last thing I want to do is allow a barbarian like Saddam Hussein to gain too much power, munitions etc.

We know what he will do if given half a chance. He will retake Kuwait. He will more than likely take Saudi Arabia and other states on the Arabian Pennensula. When he has viable weapons of mass destruction and a delivery system, he will do severe damage to neighboring states before they or we have a chance to react. We have to move preemptively on this guy. For the same reason we are going after the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Saddam has to be taken down.

Was the Korean war worth it? Today half the Korean Pennensula is free. Are those free citizens worth the price? Was free Kuwait worth the price? Was keeping Saddam from controling half or more of the world's oil supply worth the price? Was the provision of a better leader for Panama worth the price? You left out a few campaigns. Was the freeing of Granada worth the price? Was it worth it to make sure that airport down there couldn't be used to further leftist goals in Central and South America? Was it worth it to deny the insurgents in El Salvador the ability to take down it's government and turn it Marxist? Was it worth it to aid the Contras and helping them to remove that communist leader?

I give Reagan a lot of credit. Although I view Gorby as better than his predicessors, I don't think he could avoid what was happening. Reagan gets the credit.

What everyone forgets is that Saddam Hussein has killed his own people with chemical weapons. He has either directly or indirectly killed millions of his own people. He openly blames the US for starving the children of his nation, saying upwards of five million have died. His pilferage of the billions in oil money set aside for their care, facilitated their deaths. So it isn't just the US that benefits from his removal. His own people will celebrate his removal. His own military will.

Look our immigration and border policies are insane. I can't argue with that. That doesn't mean we can turn a blind eye to Saddam.

As for oil dollars, and Bush being in the pocket of big oil, that's not possible. It's not possible for him to be seeking big profits from cheap oil. If Iraq is stabalized, oil prices will fall. Tell me one big oil company that will profit from lower stabalized oil prices.

Every person who makes the claim that Bush is in the big-oil pocket, would curse the day he every let Saddam take over half the world's oil supply. If the oil flow were interrupted, they would damn him for that too. Cold winters in New England to empty cars when they needed to go to work would be the excuse then to go after Bush.

Look, we don't live in a perfect world. Evil does exist. We are not perfect, but we are going to try to react to evil in a reasonable manner. You can rest assured we will make mistakes. You can also rest assured no other nation on the planet would do better.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful, well-written reply. I asked some deliberately provocative (although not insincere) questions, and you gave us some very good answers.

I'm not sure that the relative freedom South Korea enjoys today was worth the extraordinarily high price WE had to pay for it, since the benefits -- both economic and political -- to the United States seem dubious to me.

I have been critical of the Gulf War, because -- again -- we paid too high a price for too small a victory. I would feel very differently if the first President Bush had not failed to finish the job and bring down Saddam Hussein then and there. Caving in to the, I think, foolish notion that the UN has some sort of jurisdiction over our policies has always struck me as pusillanimous.

I truly believe that if we're going to prosecute a war, we should never try to do so with half measures. look at the mess we're in today, most probably BECAUSE Bush I didn't FINISH the job.

Grenada? I left that out, because it was such a pushover, I suppose. I'm certainly not sorry we did it.

I was a vigorous and outspoken supporter of Admiral Poindexter, General Secord and Colonel North during the Iran Contra Affair. I sent each of them considerable sums of money and wrote countless letters to newspapers, magazines, Senators and Representatives on their behalf. The nakedly political attempt by the Demonrats to destroy Ronald Reagan's presidency over this trumped up issue struck me as contemptible at the time. Nothing that has been written subsequently has changed my mind on that.

My views on Iraq differ from yours ONLY in that I truly believe we ought to clean our OWN house -- by first sealing our borders, and then deporting, excluding and disempowering Muslims and their apologists from any sort of participation in American society, until the conflict is resolved in our favor.

By leaving our homeland virtually undefended and sending a large number of our troops abroad, we MAY be leaving ourselves wide open to further attack here at home. That is why I think we may be putting the cart before the horse in going after Saddam.

By that line of reasoning it is both too late -- and too EARLY -- to wage war on Iraq.

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