Quote:The flag was only taken down, when the Iraqi (the few who were there) protested against the US flag.

Quote:Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge “that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who took the lead public role in defending that proposition, said, among other particulars, that “our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent.”

Quote:Mid East stability as a whole
The relationship of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian problem
State Sponsored Terrorism
Proliferation of NBC weapons, thirty years of non proliferation efforts having been less than universally successful
UN inability or unwillingness to back up its sanctions
Emotional impact of 9-11.
Viiolations for 12 years of the 1991 cease fire agreements
--Others I may be blind to

Quote: The example serves as a threat to all socalled "US opposing" nations, without the need to say it loud. The recent warnings to Iran, France, N-Korea, Syria, etc, gained considerable impact, is it not?

Quote:How is it that you feel a need to demonstrate complete cluelessness as to why Mid East stability is in America's stratgeic interests? Its impact on the global economy. Gee, a sad day when such a simple principle needs to be spelled out, not to mention how many threads that linkage has been raised here. Your implication is that 'war is about oil' and presents a useless bit of reductionism of the sort that I mentioned earlier. Mid East stability is the issue, and it is an issue due to its impact on the entire global economy: oil addiction is a universal sin of every nation in the global economy.

Quote:Take your singleminded obsession with oil as a root cause, and answer me this: how has the world gotten along for 12 years with Iraqi production at a fraction of its potential? Just fine, and a whole lot of folks elsewhere made plenty of money by the supply-demand curve being bumped up slightly.

Quote:If a wave of 'democratization' sweeps the Mid East, which it may, then it is reasonable to believe that some of the nations will change to Islamic Republics, and will likely take a position vis a vis America analgous to Iran's: Yankee Go Home. This is consistent with their cultures still being about 2-300 years behind the West, socially, as regards the relationships between Church/Mosque and State. Catching up won't be an Overnight Express delivery.

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Quote:Why put up bases in Iraq? The only reason I can come up with is to 'guarantee their security/ vis a vis Iran. I don't think that dog hunts. The international oil market, and the UN, and everyone else, has such an interest in Iraqi oil that I am pretty sure that Iraq, in one form or another, will be the benificiary of its own natural resources. That detail will, I suspect and hope, get massive public scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic.

Quote:King of Saudi Arabia gets paranoid, begs for Americans to stay. His problem, however, becomes a matter of internal reform/revolt, which Americans stationed on his soil can't resolve for him. Also, in that case, I see the Kurds splitting off completely, to open a whole new can of worms that impacts NATO.  Now, what my brain cannot see is how US bases in Iraq would prevent that: Viet Nam taught us a few lessons about messing about in civil wars that I think were learned well enough not to go down that road.

Quote:The problem with an oil embargo is that those who put it in place inflict pain on themselves, particularly as the lack of diversified economies in some of those states makes them as dependent on oil revenue as industrial economies are on oil: how long they can put up with the pain is an interesting variable to speculate on.

Quote:Actually, I think a military confrontation is more likely with North Korea, than with Iran. North Korea has proved itself to be untrustworthy, and so making deals (ala: we succumb to you blackmail and give you free fuel and food, so you don't build nukes) is worthless. But, we won't go in without buying off China big time.

Quote:Germany - they never have really sided with us verbally on wars (not wanting to appear to eager), but just quietly helped to foot the bill. Their play recently was seen by most as a way to curry favor with France, and assert some European dominance. Had France gone tacitly along, or at least were not obstructing us, Germany would have never led that movement alone.

Quote:France -- will lose out big time both economically, and in the roles within NATO, and elsewhere in which the US will deal with them. They seem to now occupy that third tier of US "friends", something after "those you can count on to help", and "those you can count on not to interfere". When one of your trusted "allies" sells banned weapons directly to your enemy, well then who needs friends like that. IMHO, Chirac stuck his neck out far, and I'm afraid he might find out soon he is missing something.

Quote:I don´t think Washington´s reactions surprise anyone in Europe (when France sold banned weapons to Saddam, he was not your enemy, btw - he was your ally ).
As for the roles within NATO, do you really think France cares ? At present, for what should they need NATO ?
And the EU army is on the way, with its own capabilities to strike abroad, indepently from the US.

Quote:We shall see. At present, EU cant handle European security 'solo.'

Quote: Maybe, as I pointed out elsewhere, some politicians will take the political risk and insist that their populations pay for their own way. That may happen.

Moldran,Apr 26 2003, 08:28 AM Wrote:It is their declared goal to enable EU to handle the next conflict of that kind without the US. It is interesting that the US even encouraged them to pursue that policy. I wonder if they still would under present circumstances.