She wished this could get more exposure. So I’m going to reprint it all here.
From James D. Macdonald,
posted on July 31, 2003 09:00 PM:
By the “president from CA” do you mean Ronald Reagan? Let’s not be
overly cute about all this.
Okay, on economic warfare. That isn’t the same as men with rifles lying
in the dirt and blowing one another’s heads off. A confusion in terms
doesn’t help anyone.
I’ve long maintained that under some circumstances war is necessary or
inevitable — attack by a foreign power, for example. (How about
Japan’s preemptive war against the USA in 1941? Or North Korea’s
preemptive war against South Korea? Or Germany’s preemptive war against
Poland? Preemptive war has a lousy history.)
War is so terrible that it must only be used when there is no other
choice. I am not convinced that that situation existed in Iraq.
How about those economic means, though? According to the CIA world fact
book, Iraq’s GDP in 2002 was $58 billion.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html
The FY 2002 US DOD budget was $329 billion.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2001/b06272001_bt287-01.html That is
to say, the US could have bought Iraq with less that 20% of the DoD
budget. I see no compelling reason to believe warfare, the
bullets-and-bayonets kind, was the only or best choice.
Now the economic boycott and “sanctions” were a bad choice too. As
Rocky used to say to Bullwinkle, “That trick never works.” Forty years
of sanctions have hardly removed Castro from power. But Castro was a
young man when he took control of Cuba. Saddam was 65 this year — and
the Iraqi life expectancy is 67 years. How long could he hold out,
especially if his sons got ambitious? And when he died, two men can’t
sit on the throne at once. The vile Uday and the unspeakable Qusay
might have fought one another, leading to a chance to overthrow the
entire government.
But rather than use our true strength in Iraq, we’ve taken another
path. We just lost two more soldiers killed today. That makes
twenty-eight just since this discussion thread started. And we’re
standing virtually alone in the world, our alliances strained, our
foreign support tarnished, our government’s reputation under question
everywhere. For what? What was so important that we couldn’t wait to
forge the diplomatic ties to solve the Iraq problem?
For that matter, how did Saddam, who didn’t attack or pose a threat to
the US, take priority over Osama, who both attacked us and poses a
continuing threat? I see from the news that we’re being warned of more
suicide airline hijackings. I see that a “Parliamentary Committee Says
War May Have Helped Bin Laden’s Terror Group”
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7299-2003Jul31.html)
“LONDON — The war in Iraq failed to reduce security threats against
Britain and may have harmed efforts to tackle the al Qaida terror
network, a parliamentary committee said Thursday. “In a report, the
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said the war may have helped
the terror group led by Osama bin Laden to recruit new members.”
I seem to remember several people warning of just this happening before
the war. What have we gained? I don’t see a net victory here. I don’t
see a victory in the future.
What I do see is this: Osama bin Laden came up with a plan to start a
war between the West and Islam, much as Charlie Manson tried to start a
war between the Blacks and Whites with his “Helter Skelter” plan. While
the war is raging, Osama will hide out in the hills somewhere (it
doesn’t matter to him if Mullah Omar lives or dies — what’s Omar to
him?) like Charlie planned to live in the desert with his “family.”.
When the fighting is over between the West and Islam, both sides will
be reduced to ruin. Osama will return from the hills in triumph to rule
over the smoking remnants of civilization, like Charlie planned to
return to rule over the wreckage of America.
A mad scheme, perhaps. It didn’t work when Manson tried.
But George W. Bush was dumb enough to go for it.
Now we’re on the rollercoaster, and I don’t see any way to get off.
Or maybe one. We have to vote Bush out of office, attempt to mend our
alliances with our traditional friends, then root out terrorists using
our strengths — international cooperation, the rule of law, fair
trials (universally seen to be fair), and our very seductive lifestyle.
This is a police matter, not a military one. Using the wrong tool
doesn’t help us.
From James D. Macdonald,
posted on October 8, 2003 05:04 PM:
In the two months since that last comment, several things have
happened:
The Valerie Plame affair has exploded.
Bush’s job approval has plummeted.
The latest round of WMD inspections has ended — with no WMD found.
Bush has gone to the UN to beg for help, and not gotten it.
The Israeli/Palestinian “road map” has collapsed.
And we’ve had 73 more US troops killed in Iraq.