drunkrussian's Journal: Political Stuff

OK, so about a year ago, the Bush administration was calling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the Axis of Evil. Now, since then, we've heard nothing about Iran, and now North Korea has admitted they have a nuclear program.

So why the hell are we going after Iraq with military force? It's a "unique situation." Iraq possesses that dangerous combination of a history of aggression, leadership by totalitarianism, and attempts to gain access to weapons of mass destruction.

OK, let's look at North Korea. Anyone remember that little thing called the Korean War? And wasn't it North Korea that fired a missile over Japan, basically for entertainment? And now they're admitting that they have a nuclear program. I'm not even going to respond to the assertion that North Korea doesn't have a totalitarian government.

This is not to mention the fact that we haven't heard a word about Iran.

Now, I'm not saying here that the use of military force against Iraq isn't a good idea (there are plenty of other reasons to disagree with that!). I don't understand the double standard here though.

OK, so while we're on that topic, let's see about why invading Iraq is a bad idea.

First of all, there seems to be this fundamental paradox nobody has explained to me. If Saddam Hussein is faced with his regime collapsing, there's an excellent chance he'll fire off his weapons of mass destruction (and we know he has chemical and biological weapons) at Israel, Europe, anywhere he can reach. He could give them to terrorist organizations and have them slip them into the US homeland. Now, that's a very worrying thought...hopefully, we have some defenses against that. However, if we have those defenses, why do we need to go after Iraq in the first place?

Wasn't this the whole idea behind the national missile defense system? If so, why aren't we waiting until the NMD system is up and running to invade Iraq? Nobody thinks Iraq is going to be able to overwhelm the proposed NMD system within a few years. So all we have to worry about is the threat of terrorists slipping a nuke in...enter Department of Homeland Security. There are many other places in the world that terrorists could come up with a nuclear weapon (Pakistan comes immediately to mind), and we shouldn't think that attacking Iraq will somehow prevent the threat of nuclear terrorism. Hopefully the DHS will do some good work.

So, basically, you can interpret this one of two ways: the NMD system will be a failure, or we just don't care about barging into something before we have more options.

Next. Suppose that we can somehow stop the WMDs from hitting us. How, exactly, are we planning to take Baghdad? Fighting in the city is out. Nobody except the Israelis has done it with any success (anyone remember the Russians trying to capture Grozny a couple of years ago?) and the Israelis suffer quite a bit of collateral damage, plus only use very limited surgical strikes. Anyone who wants proof of our inability to fight urban combat, I refer you to Mogadishu in 1993. You can see it in Black Hawk Down.

OK, so we're not going to fight in the city. Are we going to beseige it then? I guess. Can you imagine how politically damaging that would be? Are we really going to keep supporting the conduct of the war? This is, of course, not to mention the whole civilians-dying-of-starvation thing.

There's really not a whole lot we can do if we don't plan to take cities. Yes, cities were indeed captured in Afghanistan...however, cities have entirely different meanings in Afghanistan. Baghdad is actually, you know, a city. Let's not forget that all the cities in Afghanistan were leveled by the Soviets.

Now, how many troops are we planning to lose? It's going to be a lot under any of the above scenarios - and possibily, civilians will also be killed in terrorist attacks incited by our attacks against Iraq.

Even if all these problems are solved, how can we be sure that the new government won't be worse than Saddam's while at the same time not be forcing our form of government upon the Iraqi people?

An even more troubling question...why were these questions not asked during the debate on the war resolution?

Anyway, barring all the above, yes I support invading Iraq. :-)