by the time this guy hit DC, Israel had nearly used nuclear weapons twice - once in 67 and again in 73. There is absolutely no mention of thinking of the UN in an armed role, result:

"When some Republicans tried to undercut Clinton on Kosovo, it was Bush and McCain together who told them don't do that. It's wrong.

"So it's not that everything they did was wrong, but I think things like Haiti and Somalia were over-reached and generally there was, I think, a difficulty in distinguishing what was American interest from what were sort of vaguely seen as international community preferences. But I'm not a unilateralist by any means. In fact I don't think you can get much done in this world if you do it alone.

As far as Iraq goes, the primary US, as opposed to Israeli concern, was and is Saddam's WMD. These could have been found more easily by massed inspectors - and then Saddam could have been taken out. As it is, we don't know where they went, and we don't know where their creators are.

"We did not have a civil war in northern Iraq or a Turkish intervention in northern Iraq."
not yet

"We didn't have an Iranian intervention to speak of in southern Iraq."
not yet - but if Sharon attacks the reactors, we are going to have 150,000 troops a long long way from home.

"We didn't have any Arab governments collapse"
not yet - but "by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia", and this while Iran has still not dropped its claims to oil fields below the Persian Gulf.

"I don't understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.

"I understand what they're thinking about. I'm not blind to the uncertainties of this situation, but they just seem to be blind to the instability that that son of a bitch was causing. It's as though the fact that he was paying $25,000 per terrorist family and issuing regular threats to most friendly governments in the region and the long list of things was of no account and the only thing to think about was that there might be some inter-communal violence if he were removed."

'some inter-communal violence"?

"We've understood very clearly that Iraq, especially the Shia population of Iraq, is both a source of danger and opportunity to the Iranians. I think it's more danger than it is opportunity. But the danger itself is incentive for them to try to intervene because the last thing they want to see, which I think is a real possibility, is an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western..."

What fucking world is this guy living in? Iran lost a good chunk of their population because of Saddam's attacks, and a good part of their fellow Shia living under Saddam were slaughtered by him.

Now what do you think the Iranians want to do about that? And when do they want to do it?

ep