(no subject)

[geekchick]

Today is Setting Orange, day 7 in the season of Discord, 3269.


I hope everyone who's all gung-ho about bombing Iraq into oblivion watches the video footage of downtown Baghdad in flames and tries to imagine their own homes and families being destroyed. It's absolutely horrifying.

[Edit 8 pm: About seven minutes of bombing, they said. I can't imagine seven minutes of that kind of terror, and I hope to god I never have to.]

Comments

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

It's not just Saddam and his sons. It's a lot of the people high up in the regime.

When the ultimatum was given for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave town, my big worry was that Saddam would come on TV and announce that he, Uday and Qusay were movig to the French Riveria, where they would a life of decadence Caligula would envy, funded by their Swiss bank accounts..and "Chemical" Ali Hussein al Majid would take over. (He earned his nickname by running every major Iraqi use of poison gas.) I mean, what could we do then? The terms would have been met, but we'd still have the WMD problem to worry about.

I'd like it if we could just target Saddam Hussein. (And we did try that on day one of the war...didn't work.) But the reality of things is that there are thousands of people involved in the real nastiness of regime, and they're going to want to fight to keep it going. After all, if it goes away, they'll lose their priveleges (and probably their lives, at the hands of their countrymen).

Flattening the whole place..I've heard people say that, too. In addition to being immoral, it's militarily counterproductive. As you note, it'd really get world opinion against us..and deservedly so. It'd also undermine any claims we had to be liberators.

As for the UN..every permanent Security Council member has involved itself in the internal affairs of other nations without a UN mandate since the UN was created. Heck, France is in the Ivory Coast right now, and you can be damned sure they aren't going to ask the UN for permission to do that.

The issue in Iraq isn't simply a government we dislike. It's a direct threat to the US. A small one at this point (unless the Iraqi government starts handing out WMD to terrorists, in which case it's a big one..and given their past history of sheltering and supporting just about every major terror group in the Middle East, not an unlikely possibility), but it's there.

Then there is the indirect threat. We can talk about not wanting to shed blood for oil, but the fact of the matter is that oil is one of he most important commodities in the world. There is little doubt that they would invade Kuwait again if we weren't there, and they'd probably make a go for Saudi. (If we backed down from this, I don't see how we could maintain containment of Iraq for much longer.) Do we really want to live in a world where the Iraqi regime dictates the price of oil? And where they can use the funds from sales of oil to fund a massive rearmament campaign? How about a world where a violent fascist (and that is what Saddam is) has shown that the most powerful country in the world can dislodge him? This effects elsewhere, after all..witness how the retreat from Mogadishu (where we never should have been in the first place, but that's a different matter) made Ossama bin Laden think we were weak.

I do wish it hadn't come to this, and that some of the other solutions attempted had worked.

But all the probelms in Iraq boil down to one thing: the Ba'ath regime, and Saddam's rule in particular. They've got to go. Given the circumstances (weak and dividded opposition, very powerful secret police, totalitarian regime that shows no signs of softening or moderating, and the potential for danger), they aren't going to go without us getting rid of them.

The good TV isn't the bombings, IMHO. It's the people ripping down posters of Saddam and cheering because they won't have to put up with him anymore. Without that as an end result, the bombing would be pointless. And I do think that is the result intended.