Just got this from our friend pre.....
"I got this message from one of my email Friends,
I (Dover) am basically a conservative hawk with modest military service years ago under my belt. But this question, "Why attack Iraq now?", has been bothering me recently. It seems to go against the grain for us to be in a "first strike" role against a tin-horn dictator like Saddam Hussein.
For possible clarification, I posed this question to a friend of mine from church who is a retired USN Admiral and currently a well-connected Defense Industry executive. I've also known him for 15 years and know him to be a smart, level-headed person, and church leader.
Here are his thoughts, but in my words.
Al Qaeda, Hamas and associated terrorists of the world are out to get the US in a big way. They proved with the Sept 11 attack that they are capable of a major strike. This just whetted their appetite for an escalation to the next level.
There is a strong likelihood that the next level will not be a similar attack that takes out 2,800 people, but leaves no long-lasting damage. They will take their time, and likely go for a strike that will try to take out a major US city. It could be a dirty bomb, with combination radiation and/or biological agents, exploded near a major city, such as from a container ship in the Hudson River, or San Francisco or Baltimore harbors. It would not even have to be unloaded, and we don't have the technology to detect it in advance. And they are likely to have several such strikes in the works, in case one or two are discovered.
We are talking about a "first strike" by them that will, for all practical purposes, seem like a last strike to us. It will do so much damage to our economy, and several hundred thousand people, that the war is over as far as the terrorists are concerned, and they won. We will only be left to wonder who did it and who to bomb in retaliation.
So the notion that we are not a "first strike" country becomes a death sentence for us, if we allow this to happen first, before we take action.
The terrorists will have a very difficult time pulling this off without the help of a small industrial complex. The current providers of such a complex to the terrorists are Syria, Iran, North Korea and Iraq.
From among these, Iraq and North Korea have the least stable leadership, and Iraq is the one with the most proven attempts to develop weapons of the type that terrorists would like to have.
It is reasonable to think that our national leaders believe that we must prove to all these countries that we are not going to sit by waiting on Armageddon. We need to stop the terrorist supporters now, and we need to show the other terrorist supporters what is in store for them if we feel we need to hit them to protect our national interests.
Terrorists have no allegiance to a particular country, so they don't fear retaliation by the US. The old cold-war standoff is no longer operative. The terrorists probably consider a nuclear retaliation against one or more of these supporting countries just the cost of war. They, and their supporting countries, also know that the US will not just heave a few nukes onto a Baghdad in retaliation, killing a couple of million innocent civilians.
The terrorists are also not members of the UN. Our discussions there are just a comedy to the terrorists.
So the US must act now in every way possible to stop the possibility of such an attack against the US. Part of that action is to deny the terrorists the support of these rogue countries. If a rogue country's leadership is so unstable that they might sell/give the terrorists the weapons, then we must stop it now. Iraq is such a country. A measured, non-nuclear attack on Iraq may cause the others to cease their support of the terrorists in such a dangerous way. It also may cause the least civilian casualties of all the alternatives.
We must make it clear to the terror-supporting countries that there will be a price to pay, and that a nuclear retaliation, which we are unlikely to use, is not the only option open to us.
I think President Bush understands he cannot let a first strike happen, and that nuclear retaliation is no longer a threat. We must go after the terrorists, and their supporters and suppliers, now.
Dover
P.S. I'm interested in your thoughts on this "Iraq" subject.
P.P.S. A history lesson from me:
Do you know why the US was in such a rush to develop the atomic bomb in WWII?It's not because we simply wanted such a weapon. It's because concerned physicists, including German refugee, Albert Einstein, warned Roosevelt in writing that the Germans had the most capable physicist in the field of nuclear physics, Nobel Prize winner, Werner Heisenberg, and he was known to have a laboratory working on such a device. We knew what would happen if he was the first to have such a weapon. Think about it.
I believe we are in a similar race today against the terrorists. The war has begun, so the "don't go to war" crowd apparently has a mis-understanding of what we are up against. We are at war today. Our country was similarly divided just before Pearl Harbor and our entry into WWII. A modern-day "Pearl Harbor" is likely a surprise that us unacceptable too us.
