Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Zeev Hed]

First, here is the reply I got to my E-mail to the 9/11 commission:

Thank you for your email to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States. Due to the volume of correspondence and our available resources, we regret that it is
not possible to respond to each piece individually and personally. Please be assured that your
correspondence will be forwarded to the appropriate staff members for further study. We
appreciate your taking the time to share information with the Commission as well as your
thoughts, concerns, and opinions and encourage you to continue to follow its work. Information
about past and future Commission activities is available on our website at
www.9-11commission.gov.

Those 16 words implied a "Clear and present danger", requiring and immediate act, preferably political rather than military, such as the "severe UN inspection regime" (see #msg-837952 and prior posts on the same question), the French veto threat forced our hands, but I doubt Congress would have provided the authorization without those sixteen words. Since Wilson was sent to clarify that issue and came back with the conclusion that no such deal between Niger and Iraq never was, nor was it even "brewing", I think that the 16 words misled Congress and the nation. Period.

There is nothing to flush out, life is dear and wasting life on false pretenses is nothing short of murder. I am not against war, but war is the last resort and typically an indication that diplomacy failed. And no, my parents did not escape Europe in the 40', both perished fighting fascism. And that my friend, because of diplomacy's failure as well, our own congress isolationism tendencies in the late 30' and Chamberlain "Peace in our times". You completely misunderstand the difference between "Pacifism" and smart diplomacy. Pacifism promotes no war, under any circumstance, smart diplomacy recognizes the need of war when all diplomatic means have been exhausted. Wars that are initiated with lies (such as the Tonkin resolution, or the Congress resolution authorizing the use of Force in Iraq, based on those 16 lying words) leads to further trouble, just as isolationism led to WWII. As for Ike, Hungary was only one small sin, the bigger sin was yielding to Bulganin's nuclear blackmail, that led to France and Israel developing their own nuclear weapons, and from there additional proliferation (South Africa and Brazil, which finally gave up on those ambitions, and later India and Pakistan). Iraq was no nuclear threat to the US (maybe to Israel, but they know how to take care of themselves, despite our condemnation of their unilateral acts against Iraq's nuclear ambitions in the 80'), they have no means of delivering such weapons to the US. At the time of the resolution, they had, apparently, no nuclear program in place and no source of fissile material (as the CIA clearly indicated after Wilson came back from hs special mission).

As for Israel, I doubt we will save Israel if it is not in our national interest, just as we withdrew our "protection" under Ike from Britain and France in 1956.