Yes, Iraq has a lot of practice at playing the public-relations side of the game -- the message we've heard throughout the years of sanctions will become deafeningly loud if a shooting war comes to Baghdad. And they'll find a large, receptive audience: in Europe and the United Nations, of course, but also among many Americans who are already uncomfortable with the idea of the U.S. "initiating" a war overseas in the absence of an openly determined rationale.
Unlike you, I think a war to overthrow Saddam and establish a new regime will require a large U.S. presence on the ground, not just a few guys from Special Forces to run the show. We're not going to get Turks and Jordanians to fight Saddam for us. We're lucky they're going to provide airspace and staging privileges to us. Remember that Jordan and the Palestinians sided with Saddam in the Gulf War, and Turkey greatly fears a revitalized Kurdish movement in Iraq. Like Pakistan in Operation Enduring Freedom, they're going along with us because they need us, not because they really want to.
I certainly can't pretend to know much about the roles of lying, exaggeration, hyperbole, evidence, rational argument, logical consistency, etc., in Arab Islamic cultures -- but I've sure tired myself out trying to figure out how they think. I appreciate how controlled the flow of information (or disinformation) is and how influential the views of government and religious leaders must be. But it's baffling to see how they can, for example, deny the Holocaust and then turn right around and call the Israel Defense Force a band of Nazis, with no one seeming to pick up on the inconsistency. <???>
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