Wow Kerry took the Florida primary!

[Occhidiangela]

EDIT: Forgot to retitle the post after preview.

TITLE: Who and what we are dealing with

Saddam Hussein. A fellow who practiced the art of the possible. A gambler. A forceful personality. An "ends justifies the means" sorta guy. A man not shy in the least about shedding anyone's blood for no better reason than he either wanted to, needed to, or had a bone to pick with someone.

That they interact, even sometimes work together again is not a question. But that an Islamic secular state, which the fundamentalist Muslims abhor would work together with a terrorist group of those same fundament defies logic.

Here you and I will disagree. I believe neither the terrorists in question nor Saddam feel bound by moral or ideological limitation in achieveing their ends, just practical ones. They used one another, like most political folks do, to include "legitimate governments."

I see no illogic whatever in Saddam having his eye on any number of operatives or organizations (sorta like the US's Oliver North deal in Iran Contra) whose aims met his. Their common ground was antipathy toward the US -- whose iron will kept the sanctions in place on his country while the Frogs and the Russkies barked to end them.

I can see him and a few of his trusted bubbas, working if not directly with, at least at arm's length with, any number of nasty folks with an eye toward "an enemy of my enemy can be my friend . . . for the time being." His hero Stalin cut that sort of deal with Hitler. I have to temper that thought with the reports that Saddam was a bit of a control freak. He trusts, and trusted, few people on this planet. As for the terrorists, they too would, if they got any support at all from Saddam, keep him at arm's length. Why? They know his rep.

As far as to the presence of terrorists in Iraq prior to the war, it is not surprising that they were there.

Yes. However, given that he ran a Stalinist police state, your comparison to . . .

Ireland, in Spain, in France, even (gasp!) in the USA

misses the mark. You just named open societies, whose strategic weakness has ever been their tolerance for everyone, to include their own enemies. Tis a civic and social strength, but in terms of power plays in the art of the possible, which is what terrorism-the-subset-of-realpolitic is, 'tis a weakness.

To use terrorism to justify the invasion of Iraq, one must show that those terrorists were working in that country with the knowledge and approval of the government.

Really? According to whom? That is not the policy that was declared shortly after 9-11. To be passive and to let them operate freely in your country is the sort of benign negligence that a terrorist thrives on, and Pres Bush took the rather ambitious, possibly Quixotic, step of defining terrorists as his, and the free world's enemy. Those who look the other way are indeed part of the problem, just as with organized crime. (You do address a bit of this later.)

You also missed at least one intermediate step. Many governments work with us to supress terrorism, to include the ones mentioned, to one extent or another. They were never a threat to be had by "and if you support and harbor terrorists, you have chosen to oppose us." All the carping about Freedom Fries was rancor over the screw job at the UN.

Now, did Saddam harbor terrorists? Were they there with his knowledge but kept tabs on? (That is my guess) Were they there completely secretly? The Ansar Al Islam base tells me . . . no. And no, Al Qaeda is not the only issue, nor was it ever.

Al Qaeda seems to represent the "Idiots' single cause terrorist" for the uncritical mind. As I understand the organization, they are rather new. Hezbollah has, or had, more street cred . . . until 1998, when the bombings of the embassies in Africa made headlines, and got OBL noticed. I also note that I was confused by the pundits and others who linked OBL and Saddam . . . both wished us ill, but in wholly differently contexts.

And not just *some* members of the government. There are IRA supporters in Parliament, Basque supporters in the Spanish government, and, for all I know, militia supporters in the USA. There sure were KKK supporters in Congress within the last seventy years.

Agreed, which is what makes terrorism so damned hard to deal with. Your comments in re crime elsewhere match my own sentiments in the general sense. All those invisible threads, some visible. Swimming with the fishes, per Mao. A cancer.

*After* the US invasion of Iraq, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists will use the fact that Iraq is at least nominally Muslim to spin more anti-USA sentiment.

If they did not have that excuse, they'd use another. About that I am certain. 9-11 happened before Iraq. USS Cole. Beirut, 1983. The two embassies. Khobar Towers. The attempt on WTC in 1993. The massacre in Rome'a airport in 1985. There will be others. OBL's group is one of many.

Since it is shown that Iraq was an accomplice to terrorism under Saddam . . .

Where?

I think the "open source" info that has been running around in re Saddam endorsing and paying off families of Palestinian suicide bombers is yet to be shown in error. Mind you, that was a game he was playing to an Arab audience, the "Israel sucks" card. So, it makes for a contributory black mark, but not a single justification for taking him down. There was always more than one basis.

At least three off the top of my head:

UN Sanctions not complied with for 12 years (All the sanctions were doing was screwing the little guy, but that was all the UN could ever agree to do, other than threaten and hollar. Wonderful. If you accept the reports of 500,000 dead in the 12 years leading up to the war, which I don't, then this last year has been an improvement, even with a war. Weird.

Terror support (Mostly known versus Israel, and again, he's got his own axe to grind, and probably preferred to do things his own way due to the trust/control issue.)

WMD programs at odds with both UN sanctions and all the treaties Iraq is party to. (hmmm, loks like the Saddam's deception plan worked too well on that one, as we discussed elsewhere . . .)

Non stated reasons, and the reasons that every liberal, in the real sense, should be glad he is gone, is his abuse of the average Achmed on a casual basis. (Of course, you could not sell that to America, nor to the UN, as a reason to get rid of him. Interesting, considering that about a third of the UN's nations are despots, sorta like Saddam-lite. ;) DHO!)

That there were some terrorists in Iraq prior to the invasion is established. That some members of the Iraq power structure supported terrorism is somewhat established.

So far so good.

As I've said above, the same can be said of England. That the Iraqi government under Saddam supported terrorism is not established. That it supported fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is unlikely.

Also agreed.

However, knowing that:

What does one DO?

While we each have our own opinions about what not to do, someone decided to DO something about him. He was intractable, has always been, and unlike England, Spain, France, Japan, Egypt, Turkey, POland, Russia, et al . . . he cannot be "worked with."

Were there other, workable options? Probably, of uncertain effectiveness. If I could have thought of one, I'd have written the article and gotten it published, and likely been the toast of the media for a few weeks. Wish I had had a good proposal, but sadly, I did not. At least you were all spared seeing me on TV. :lol:

As I noted elsewhere, I think the assumption (you noted in another post the thin victory) of a defeat in 2004 was a factor in getting something done before the party of appeasement hit the White House again. That is the only explanation I have for why it had to happen in 2003, besides riding the emotion of 9-11 while it was there. Why NOW?

"Justified" What an interesting term.

It is almost as though the discussion going on is some sort of court room soap opera. Real world geopolitiks gets talked about at the salon level, but in getting anything done, it gets done at the execution level. And people die. The comments someone made about war really do apply:

"The two belligerents are neither one of them moral, one is just more immoral than the other." Not sure who that is from.

In the immoral world of geopolitics, there are no rules beyond "what can I get away with?" That is not news.

So, while we discuss "should or should not" the die has been cast.

The question is" What now?" Or as Lenin asked:

"Chto delat?" (Which I think means 'what is to be done?')

That is not a question for Pres Bush. Nor for Pres Kerry, if he wins. (Hey, back to the original topic of the thread!!!!! ) It is a question for the American people.

Can The People work through a hard, difficult to simplify security problem? If so, how nice. If not, it does not matter who is in the White House: the enemy will have the advantage.

--Rambling Rogue--