| | Matthew,
Thank you for your reply, to which I would like to add the following remarks.
You wrote:
Firstly you seem to conflate Saddam Hussein's secular socialist regime with Islamic fundamentalism. The latter is certainly a grave threat to the west, which must be fought culturally and where necessary with military strikes. However Saddam had little if anything in common with fundamentalism, indeed by all accounts bin Laden condemned him as an infidel as well. Hitler accused Bolshevism of being a Jewish conspiracy and sent quite a few German Communists to their deaths. That did not prevent him from studying the Gulags when planning his own labor camp and death camp systems, from training his (then secret and illegal) Luftwaffe in the USSR, from signing the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact, or from using Stalin as an ally in the invasion of Poland.
Similarly, Saddam called himself the Sword of Allah when it suited him, bought houses for and paid large sums of cash to the families of religious Palestinian suicide bombers on the West Bank, and opened his nation as a refuge to notorious retired terrorists. Also, during the First Gulf War it was Iran to which he sent his air force to prevent it from being destroyed on the ground. This is the same Iran, run by Shiite Mullahs, whose teenage soldiers he had unleashed chemical warfare against in the previous decade. Violent Islamic power lusters are birds of a feather. To assume they do not and will not unite to attack us when it suits their purposes is to over-intellectualize their respective stated reasons for hating us. Such an assumption is a weak reed on which to base a defense plan for Western civilization, and it has been proven false time and again. The Czech government, btw, has to my knowledge stuck by its claim that al-Queda operatives met with Saddam's emissaries in Prague prior to 9/11. Iraq under Saddam was a nation that terrorists of various stripes could move through freely, while using Baghdad as a meeting place.
Secondly, even assuming that Saddam's regime did have some sort of WMD development programme, I would question the likelihood of him attacking the west - for the same reason that the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China never attacked the west (despite their repeated claims that the triumph of communism was inevitable) - namely fear of deterrence, which is partly why I don't think Rand's cold war views are entirely irrelevant here. Saddam had a reactor at Osirak that was bombed by the Israelis in the 1980s just before it was scheduled to go into plutonium production. Had they not done so, many experts believe Iraq would have had a nuclear bomb in time for his invasion of Kuwait. Such a deterrent would certainly have prevented Desert Storm from going forward, and Saddam would have probably wound up with the (oil rich) Easter Province of Saudi Arabia as well.
He used chemical weapons on the Iranians and the Kurds. Two 150-mm shells, one filled with a binary sarin nerve gas system and one with good old-fashioned mustard gas were found by US troops yesterday. These were to have been destoyed by the terms of the ceasefire that ended the First Gulf War. So please let's stop assuming that Saddam had a WMD development program and just state flat-out that he did had operational WMDs and did in fact use them.
As to the justification for Bush's launching or the war, the question is not whether Saddam had a nuclear bomb or a plan to build one. The question is whether we had valid reason at the time to suspect that he did. His earlier attempt at Osirak, the repeated reports since the collapse of the USSR of Iraqi agents in Ukaine and elsewhere shopping for technology, 16 of 16 UN declarations violated over more than a decade, and years of his bugging, blocking, stone-walling, and expelling weapons inspectors say that we did. Bill Clinton, Hans Blix, French intelligence and others were agreed on this, before it became fashionable to label Bush a lying war-monger.
If he had nukes, we would not have been able to attack him. We would have had to worry that they would wind up in terrorists' hands, as we currently do with Pakistan's bombs. A Soviet-style nuclear first strike on the West is not the issue. As I said in the previous post, the main worry is a suitcase bomb smuggled in by terrorists. With multiple nations able to provide the nuke, and multiple parties willing and able to deliver it, whom would we retaliate against? Hence my contention, by no means original with me, that we have lacked a believable deterrent to such an attack. Our only hope to create such deterrence now is _to respond to 9/11 harshly_.
The fight against Islamic terrorism calls for alternative methods to conventional warfare for precisely the reason that the terrorists are not all located in one country which might in theory be nuked to hell. Indeed the US' supposed ally Saudi Arabia is at the heart of the wahibbist revival. (And of course, if Iraq had turned out to have a WMD programme, the power vacuum following the toppling Hussein's regime would have made it far more likely that these weapons would fall into terrorist hands.)
We are agreed on Saudi Arabia. I have more thoughts on this than I can write now, and would like to submit an essay of my own to SOLO on this topic in a month or so.
Thirdly on the issue of Islam in the US, what precisely do you think ought to be done about it? Forcibly shutting the schools down would violate the rights of the muslims.
I wasn't speaking of private Muslim schools. I have no quarrel with them (as such and in principle.) I was referring to "diversity" classes, funded by the Saudis, in the general American public schools. In these courses the teachers would have _the whole class_ dress in Arab garb, and then lead them in Muslim prayers. This in schools where public Christian prayer had been banned decades ago, on the correct grounds that it violated the separation of church and state. The words "under God" have been struck from the Pledge of Allegiance in the last two years for the same reason.
-Bill
(Edited by William A. Nevin III on 6/16, 10:54pm)
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