What if Saddam uses WMD?

[MMMMMM]

They are going to send hit teams anywhere in the world for the purpose of hunting and killing radical Islamic terrorists. I wish them much success in this endeavour, especially in the USA.

[brad]

yeah well lets hope youre not a waiter. (reference to that danish waiter they killed by mistake.)

yeah having foreign hit teams assassinating americans makes me feel real good.

[MMMMMM]

brad I don't think they will be assassinating Americans (and I didn't hear anything about a Danish waiter). They are looking for specific Middle Eastern terrorists who are probably here illegally or on visas.

If they had been doing this earlier it's possible they might even have nailed Mohammed Atta & Co. before the WTC disaster.

[brad]

well its confirmed mossad was 'tailing' all the arab suspects in 9-11.

different people make different stuff out of that fact, but you may have a point.

[adios]

Aren't chemical weapons in violation of the Geneva Convention? Here's a story about possible Iraqi use of chemical weapons, you know those weapons that there was no prove of:

Coalition Jets Pound Republican Guard Near Baghdad; Chemical Attack Feared

[adios]

"Every time a country attacked another, the attacker claimed it "defended" something or other, be it vital interests, danger of imminent attack or innocent lives at the other side of the border. Whatever. Attackers rarely, if ever, admit they're just plain attacking."

Huh? Clearly there have been times in history where a country(s) should have acted pre-emptively in their defesnse and the results were disasterous because they didn't.

"..Pre-emptive nuclear strike (i.e. First Strike) was much discussed during the Cold War. It was found to be quite an intriguing concept by the deviant psychopaths drawing scenarios with millions of deaths in the Nat'l Security Council. Now the Cold War is over and we don't have to deal with messy nukes no more; so pre-emptive conventional warfare is most definitely here to stay."

Good thing Israel helped keep it that way with their pre-emptive strike on Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1981.

[Cyrus]

"Clearly there have been times in history where a country(s) should have acted pre-emptively in their defense"

Such as?

"Good thing Israel helped keep it that way with their pre-emptive strike on Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1981."

If you accept pre-emptive and unilateral action as legitimate, then you cannot later invoke any kind of legal constraints on the part of the combatants. And that includes the Geneva Convention. Going outside the law and then invoking it is illogical.

If you accept unilateralism and pre-emptive action only from the part of a select few, such as the United States and Israel (okay, and Britain too -- room for Spain?), then the rest of the world is liable to undertake any measures necessary, however odious and immoral, in order to redress somewhat the balance. Ergo, the recipe for more terrorism.

This is a self-defeating logic.

[nicky g]

The Danish waiter thing was a while ago, but well-documented. It was a collassal and unforgivably avoidable intelligence cock-up, and Israel has never apologised or offered compensation to his fiance, who was pregnant at the time and with him when they killed him. THere's a good account of it in the book that came out to tie in with that film about the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics (12 days in September? Narrated by Michael Douglas is all I remember)

I don't think Iran have supplied any help to al-Qaeda. The fact that some Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters have crossed into Oran is irrelevant - we're talking about huge open spaces here that are pretty easy to hide in , it does not remotely suggest that the Iranian governemtnis in anyway supporting them.

[nicky g]

"They are going to send hit teams anywhere in the world for the purpose of hunting and killing radical Islamic terrorists. I wish them much success in this endeavour, especially in the USA."

But... it's totally illegal.

[The_Baron]

Let's put it in more simplistic terms for you. They shoot at us, they get blown up, this is much better than any of our people getting shot or blown up. It's always better for the other guy to get blown up.
For whatever it's worth, a 2000lb bomb has an effective casualty radius of something on the order of 250 meters. It's effects last something on the order of 2.5 seconds. A 152mm artillery shell loaded with VX nerve agent has an effective casualty radius of roughly 75 meters, it also renders a teardrop shaped area, widening as a function of atmospheric conditions, downwind uninhabitable and lethal for anywhere between days and a few hundred years. The stuff has essentially the consistency of axle grease and lethality measured in micrograms per kilogram. It doesn't just go away. Artillery shells don't come one to a building, they come four or five or ten thousand to a complete fire mission. Work out the numbers using just 2500 rounds fired along a geographic line. Tell me how much area is destroyed by that. Now look at the four foot deep, 25 foot wide blast crater left behind by that 2000lb JDAM.
Get over it, a High Explosive bomb isn't a WMD by any definition. It's just a bomb.

The Baron