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March 24, 2003
View From Afar
There are two critical objectives of this war. The first is to get Saddam. By get I mean kill or capture. Right now, it is too early to know one way or another the status of Saddam but be assured the US is holding back no effort to find him. This is because one of the lessons the current President learned from the elder Bush is that it was a mistake not to continue on to Baghdad in Gulf War I.
The second is to find weapons of mass destruction. While the President, his administration, and his military commanders try to but on a brave face about how world opinion does not matter to them, if the US does not find such weapons, whatever little international support they have will evaporate. But more importantly, domestic support will also substantially decline.
So what if either or both objectives are not met? No one can say for sure, but I think in the first instance, we will end up fighting Gulf War III to finish the job. In the second, domestic support will erode enough leading to the President losing the next election.
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Comments
Getting Sadam is not the main point. I mean just going up and shooting him would not solve much of anything. Seeing that there are a bunch of 'fake' Sadams running around I suspect that Sadam himself is just the figure head. Apart from Sadam the whole Bath party-top (and then some) need to be eliminated.
I suspect that no chemical/biological/nuclear weapons will be found unless they are used (or *conspiracy theory* brought in). The thing with bio/chem weapons is that they are dificult to store and keep but, relatively, easy to produce. So stockpiling is not a good idea (and if they were stockpiled the inspectors would probably have found them already). What the military must be looking at is production capacity. But that is dificult. I mean after dropping a bomb on a lab or small chem plant there is not much left to prove it's a weapons production unit.
Because of this dificulty of finding proof it will be dificult to convince people any proof actually found is not spoofed.
Posted by: sjon at March 25, 2003 10:42 PM