What You Don't Read in the Papers

[Occhidiangela]

"Sorry, preemptive war *might* (just "might", no more) be justified if there is a real threat. That threat was what was sold to the American people and it was a lie. AFAIK no one got killed because Clinton lied about getting his dick sucked. Shrub's lies to the American people had a bit more repercussion"

As to the fellatrix madness, tempest in a teapot. What, the President of the US, one of the toughest jobs on the planet, does not rate a little knobber now and again? Geeze, folks, that's kinda harsh. I am just glad to see Newt took that face shot and dropped from sight, payback is a bitch, right Newt? (The way I see it, the pain from Congress could never have come close to equalling what the "hell hath no fury" pain from the wife publicly betrayed could inflict, long term.)

As to threat discussions. Doing nothing solves nothing, but doing "nothing" was never on the table. Keep on with the UN process was an option, and therein lies the a key problem: what prospect for success with 12 years of crappy track record? It's a gamble, and lots of under the table crap going on with a bunch of allies and others not so friendly. There are and were doubtless other options, many of which never saw the light of day: some because they were stupid, some due to complexity and too many moving parts.

"Threat" in what time frame?

If you see a threat in the mid term, and know-predict that inaction only makes it more probable, how are you to deal with short attention span sheep who are happy to defer dealing with a threat until it hits them in the face, until it is un-unscrewable?

The subjective assessment is: how long does it take for this threat to manifest itself, at which point it becomes Too Damned Late?

Here is part of your answer, and I am not all that keen on it. But none of this crap is easy, none of it, even though many of us want it to be rendered simpler to better understand it. It's all dirty business, as was the bombing of Serbia for 71 days.

Assume "wait and see" for another year, and then RISK that the election goes to the opposition. On that branch of "the possible" one can safely assume 4 more years of appeasement/UN work trying will solve the problem. (Track record => low confidence there.) So, your shortest time horizon is 6 years. In that time, if the correctioin is not made, will the threat be more dire? Many variables come into play, and your comments some months ago at the lack of elegance in manipulating international partners are well taken by this rogue.

Given Short Attention span Congress and public, who are all too often happy to rely on hope as a method

(see the damned foolishness lately on the tax cuts after the war started, talk about the insanity of Guns AND Butter that did in the Soviets . . . and Lyndon Johnson, a Texan)

then I'd say those who argue that "the threat was not dire enough TODAY" did not look at the problem closely enough. It is at least a 6 year time frame, which was, politically, completely unmarketable. There was therefore no clean way to sell it and have actual OPTIONS available. It is not an option to toss two straw men into a decision brief, with one Course of Action presented. (Hehe, that works both ways, I know, I once had an Admiral ram that point home to me rather forcibly, accompanied by a PowerPoint brief thrown my way, a few years back.) If you argue that not enough imagination was exercised, you may be right. Were there only two courses of action available to choose from?

And that, Pete, is just the tip of the iceberg. The WMD and its spectre were important images used for the PR campaign to support a two pronged course of action: 1441 and a multinational effort to "once and for all" solve WMD measures already in place and going nowhere, with the serial being that if that fails, (which it did in the Security Council) what eventualy happened. The attempt to use a demonstration, a show of force, which was a series of deployments in October, before 1441, ended up being a bluff called by Saddam: much to the sorrow of more than one man in Iraq.

If you seek a clean, simple justification, which I don't think you are, I expect you'll wait a long time. If you are disappointed in the process itself, and how many options weren't even up for consideration . . . you are in good company. Given the choices perceived, the justification borders on "good enough" at best. But a hell of a lot of that depends on where you sit.

FWIW: It strikes me that some of the PR was incidental, and not of White House's doing. (That country song: Do You Remember- what in the blazes did that have to do with Saddam Hussein?)