<<Saddam took his wives and himself to a underground bunker a few hours before the planes struck the WTC. He put Iraq on the highest war time alert at this time, before the planes struck.>> How do you know this?
<<the question is , do you sleep well at night knowing that some where out there, the bioweapons exist in lebanon, syria , libya, or Iraq and can be freely passed to the group of strangers called Al-Queda, who are fighting to destroy the western world suddenly or quietly, like constantinople, a slow death by economics?>> Another maxim from Machiavelli: You don't do things that make your enemy stronger. You don't, for example, eliminate an enemy of your enemy as long as he is weaker than you are and you can more or less control him, because you can probably find a use for the enemy in the future to eliminate the common enemy. Al Qaeda doesn't mind us eliminating Saddam and being in Iraq with an occupying force (see the article below on this). This helps them. They can get arms from places other than Iraq. They don't get sanctuary there as it is. A US Iraqi occupation will only allow them to more forcefully make their propaganda points about the US with other wavering potential Islamic friends.
You may or may not know that the 1954 Brown decision was only in part driven by considerations of justice for black people. If you read the decision, you will see that another important (I would argue primary, though in the public background) consideration was Cold War propaganda. The Soviets went to the third world and said, in effect, "Those guys talk endlessly about 'freedom', but look at what they do not what they say. They keep their colored people in virtual slavery, they treat them miserably, they lynch them, whites kill them with impunity, you think they are going to treat you guys (third world people) any better? No way. They'll just use you the way imperialist nations always use their colonies." Brown was an attempt to respond to that Soviet tactic, to finally end US legal apartheid.
Osama and friends aren't stupid. They will make arguments analogous to the Soviet Cold War arguments. The only way those arguments won't work is if the US really does rebuild Iraq. This administration won't even rebuild its own country (the states are in trouble, they better find their own way out), its priority is lowering taxes on already wealthy people--do you honestly believe that they will commit to rebuilding Iraq? Not hardly, IMO. Their "commitment" will last a few months, maybe even a year or through the next election. That's it. There won't be money for it. Will the American people stand for putting up billions for Iraq while their states are broke and can't even fund public education properly? Even to the minimalist extent that it is funded today--a couple of school districts have gone to 4 day weeks to save money! Except for the wealthy school districts that comprise Bush's primary true constituents, the only ones he really attends to, teachers are already poorly paid; and that is especially true of many of the private schools that this admin wants to use as showcases of education. Its a joke. Look at Afghanistan. It's a mess. Iraq will also be mess unless hundreds of thousands of US troops are there, where they will be an occupying force and a target in foreign land where they don't know how to live and have no business being.
This war won't make us safer, it will make the "patriots" beat their chests and feel macho. Whoopee. When the rest of the world is nauseated by US stupidity, the patriots will cry about how ungrateful the world is, let's pull out of the UN, let's let "them" stew in their own juices. Gee, how brilliant they are.
This admin will lead us into a short term military victory which will be an intermediate and long term disaster, IMO. It will be a financial and economic disaster as well as a political disaster. It may take years for it to really play out. It isn't too late to turn it into a short term bad period but a longer term success, but given Bush's hobgoblin mind, that isn't likely.
See my bolding in the article below.
Saddam May Be U.S. Target in Event of War By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is being threatened with trial as a war criminal if the United States goes to war with Iraq.
If the Iraqi president and his generals "take innocent life, if they destroy infrastructure, they will be held accountable as war criminals," President Bush (news - web sites) said Tuesday.
The White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) offered a grimmer scenario. Saddam and his inner circle would be legitimate targets for U.S. forces, he said.
"If we go to war in Iraq, and hostilities result, command and control and top generals, people who are in charge of fighting the war to kill the United States' troops, cannot assume they will be safe," Fleischer said.
"If you go to war, command and control are legitimate targets under international law," the spokesman said. Asked whether that could mean Saddam, Fleischer replied, "Of course."
A 1976 ban on assassinating foreign leaders was put into place by President Ford in response to criticism of CIA (news - web sites)-backed plots in the 1960s and 1970s. President Reagan extended the executive order in 1981 to include hired assassins. Bush could overturn the ban by signing a document, but Fleischer declined to say whether he is considering doing so.
Bush plans a speech on Iraq late Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank from which he drew many of his aides.
He is expected to argue that Saddam is a menace to the Iraqi people and getting rid of him would make the Middle East more stable.
Offering Congress and the American public a peek into war and postwar preparations, the Army's top general said Tuesday that a military occupying force could total several hundred thousand soldiers.
Iraq is "a piece of geography that's fairly significant," Gen. Eric K. Shinseki said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites). Any postwar occupying force, he said, would have to be big enough to maintain safety in a country with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."
Shinseki said he couldn't give specific numbers of the size of an occupation force but would rely on the recommendations of commanders in the region.
"How about a range?" asked Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the committee.
"I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers," the general said. "Assistance from friends and allies would be helpful."
Afterward, Levin called Shinseki's estimate "very sobering."
In a speech prepared for Wednesday delivery to the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Joe Lieberman (news - web sites), D-Conn., is calling on the Bush administration to work with the United Nations (news - web sites) to name an international administrator to oversee reconstruction of Iraq.
A U.S. civilian administrator "would put America in the position of an occupying power, not a liberator," says Lieberman, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. "And it may well widen the gulf between the United States and the Arab world."
In northern Iraq, which was pried from Saddam's control to protect Kurdish civilians after the 1991 Persian Gulf war (news - web sites), White House and State Department officials were holding a meeting with political opponents of Saddam's government.
Zalmay Khalilzad, of the National Security Council staff, and David Pearce, who is in charge of the Iraq desk at the State Department, were helping to plan the kind of government that would take over in Baghdad after an ouster of Saddam.
The anti-Saddam Iraqis are a diverse group, with sometimes conflicting interests. Kurdish leaders, for example, are uneasy with U.S. plans to station troops in northern Iraq in the event of war.
To Iraq's north, Turkey fears that Iraqi Kurds would try to create their own state if Saddam was overthrown, encouraging secession by Turkey's own Kurdish minority.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the Bush administration supports the territorial integrity of Iraq — meaning it was opposed to the country's breakup — and multiethnic rule in Baghdad.
Bush, meanwhile, predicted Saddam would try to "fool the world one more time," by disclosing some weapons that he had previously denied having. But the president insisted the only way the Iraqi leader could avoid war was "full disarmament. The man has been told to disarm. For the sake of peace, he must completely disarm."
On Wednesday, continuing his talks with world leaders, Bush was due to meet with President Geidar Aliev of Azerbaijan, which is 250 miles northeast of Iraq and has backed the U.S. call for Iraq's disarmament.
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