Augie, well, lets discuss a preemptive strike on Iraq. About twenty years ago, Saddam kept saying quite openly and on every occasion afforded him, that he is dedicated to destroy Israel including the use of Nuclear weapons to do that. He thus embarked on a major Nuclear weapon program. The Israeli, took his speeches seriously, ands since Iraq was (and still is) at war with Israel (they never even signed an armistice agreement, if memory serves), Israel took a preemptive approach to the "clear and present danger" to its survival, and took out the nuclear facilities. Israel was of course condemned by the whole world, East and west and all colors in between (including by our President at the Time, Reagan). Now we are standing at a similar cross road, our intelligence is saying that the mad man is once more engaged in development of WMD, and some even claim he has a massed a small arsenal of fission bomb and enough U235 to make a large quantity of such bombs. So, lets do what we condemned ourselves 20 years ago. Where is the rational?
Not only, we should abide by the same rule we imposed on Israel at the time, but really, the threat Israel faced was "clear and real" (Saddam own daily chant that he intends to nuke them), but Saddam has yet to issue a single proclamation that he intends to use WMD on the US (the man is a megalomaniac, but not stupid). What excuse do we have to start such a conflagration?
More importantly, we must keep in mind that if we unilaterally open a campaign against Saddam, we are going to set an international precedence, a very dangerous one. One can make a very strong argument that Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility (a truly surgical strike with minimal casualties, yet complete eradication of the threat for a solid twenty years), was justified under the doctrine of preemptive defensive strike. As fas as I can see, the only international law we can operate under is the doctrine of "preemptive defensive attack". It is quite a murky Doctrine, and requires a heavy burden of proof that a clear and present danger exists. In the absence of even a single oral or written threat to our land by Saddam, what will our excuse be?
If we do engage in such a preemptive strike, what will prevent China, sometime in the next ten to twenty years to use nuclear blackmail on Taiwan, or on India, or even on Russia, for a perceived danger to its national security? For that matter, Iran may very well use the precedence set by us in nuking the "threats" it sees in Israel. You got to understand the logic. , Israel never vowed to eradicate Iran, but right now, Iran's leaders keep proclaiming their support for the utter destruction of Israel, that puts Iran in danger of an Israeli retaliation, and thus Iran feels "unsafe" and threatened by Israel, and would be justified, under such a new preemptive doctrine, set by us, to attack Israel (strange logic, right?).
We must make sure, that an attack on Iraq will not create international precedents to aggression, and thus the burden of proof must be not only enormous, and open to international scrutiny.
A much better policy, which would cost much less than a military offensive, would be to "buy" influence within Iraq. Other strategies, similar to those used by Reagan to bring down the "evil empire" should be tried first as well. I am sure that many options for a regime change, including keeping Saddam within his cage, until he dies naturally, will be more effective than creating a dangerous international precedence, lowering the threshold for open aggression against an adversary. Frankly, the current sabre rattling looks too much like a political ploy used by despots the world over for thousands of years, you got internal domestic problems? Find a scapegoats, and divert attention from your insoluble internal problems to that scape goat. The timing with the coming congressional election stinks as well.
Zeev
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