Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Dear god, have some intellectual integrity! All of you denizens of the Zone!

Intellectual integrity.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Fine. Your alternative:

Leave Saddam in power in perpetuity. Keep the sanctions up. They were working so well. Surround the Middle East with massive American military might. But do nothing with it for years. This will eat billions of dollars while accomplishing nothing, and delight all the other nations over there.

And for the next few decades:

Hope that the U.N. will catch him if he tries anything--the same U.N. under whose very nose Saddam constructed a proven nuclear weapons program before the first Gulf War while the U.N. saw nothing. If there had not been a Gulf War One, Saddam would have been sitting on atomic warheads while Clinton was still president. The same U.N. that had everything to gain from the status quo and everything to lose if Saddam turned out to be pulling the wool over their eyes.

Hope that Saddam's proven and repeated ambition for weapons of mass destruction never amount to anything.

Hope that Saddam never decides to actively support terror attacks on the West.

Hope that Saddam doesn't try something like Kuwait again.

And above all, don't do anything aggressive until the entire population of Tel Aviv or Washington D.C. is dying vomiting up their own insides. After all, we have to let the bad guy shoot first, right?

I don't know why there is a gap between the intelligence beforehand and what we are finding now. To claim that thousands of people all over the world lied about it is insane. I don't know why Saddam continued to conceal the truth--any truth--knowing it would mean a military attack. You can construct plausible scenarios all day long on this. Soon enough we'll know.

Personally, the fact that the entire Iraqi WMD program, whatever its status, is now a moot point suits me just fine. An accomplished fact is better than hope. Given a choice between the U.S. military squelching Saddam's ambitions or relying on Hans Blix and his heirs for the next thirty years, I know which one I'd pick.

Forget the oppression, the mass graves, the abuse of his people. The antiwar people have already stipulated this as utterly irrelevant.

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