[Ginogino]

Marbles:
Forgive my posting here rather than in reply to your own post. My first point is that there are lots of places where action by someone might be called for. In essence, any country with the capacity to brew beer is technologically able to create biological weapons. Likewise, any country with at least a World War I level of technology can create chemical weapons (after all, that's what the WWI countries were able to do). How many countries have either biological or chemical weapons? I'd suspect most of them do. We are reasoably sure that Iraq has both chemical and biological weapons because we (the US) sold them the stuff to make both kinds of weapons (during the Reagan and papa Bush administrations).

But so near as I can tell, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Lybians (remember Khadaffi?), the Israelis, the Pakistanis, and the Indians all have "weapons of mass destruction" -- and almost any country that cares to have them does.

The two related questions regarding a war with Saddam are: 1) is this a good use for our resources (economic, military, diplomatic, etc.), and 2) is it more dangerous to go to war than not to?

We can't be policeman for the world. To do that we'd have to solve the Israeli/Palestinian mess, intervene in the coming crisis in Zimbabwe, keep peace in the Kashmir, resolve the Russian/Uzbeki conflict, just to name a few. One does have to take a stand on principles in the right place, but even the US doesn't have the resources to solve everything everywhere. We can most certainly win a war in Iraq -- but then what? The senior general in the Army just stated that, in his opinion, we'd have to leave all 200,000 soldiers in Iraq for a number of years after winning in order to maintain the peace there (question: how long did it take for us to get our GI's out of Germany and Japan after WWII?). Holding Iraq together post Saddam will be something like holding Yugoslavia together post Tito -- and maybe just a bit harder. The southern Iraqi's want to join Iran. The Kurds want their own state. Turkey definitely doesn't want to see a Kurdish state (and the reason we're paying them so much to let us invade through Turkey is in part because we don't want a separate Turkish invasion, since who's going to throw them out after they seize the northern oil fields?). I sometimes think that the first mistake made by the West was to break up the Ottoman Empire after WWI -- the Ottomans, though corrupt, mostly kept Jews and Muslims and Christians at peace in Jerusalem.

As to the question of the danger posed by a successful war with Iraq, it should be obvious that such success becomes Osama bin Laden's best recruiting aid. Somehow we had every country in the world on our side on Sept. 12, 2001. And somehow we've managed to piss off 99% of them since then. We have espoused a new rule for international conflict (get them before they attack) which promises to upset what little stability exists in South Asia. Are we telling the North Koreans and Iranians (both countries either have nuclear weapons or are close to developing them) that they'd best use it or lose it?

Add to that: the current administration in the US is not particularly good at following up on pledges and promises (question: in Bush's 2004 budget what sum was allocated for rebuilding Afghanistan? Zero -- though Congressional leaders have rectified that since. Has the budget allocated the sums promised for firefighters and police? No. Are we spending the money necessary to make our ports secure? No (it would cost less than what we've promised Turkey).

I'm not saying that we have the bucks to do everything. We don't. So, I think we need to pick our spots and find places where we get the most results for the least efforts. I fear that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict poisons everything else we try in the area -- even with the best of intentions -- and makes it easy for evil people to raise new generations of terrorists against us. I don't knwo how much we can do in that conflict, but I do know that we're not trying very hard. And that, too, will come back to bite us before we're done.

It sounds so wuss-ish to make an argument that our priorities are wrong, but I fear that this error on priorities is leading us to a major misfortune.

Gino