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Why Attack Iraq?
(rec’d from a reader – source unknown)
I realize it is one person's opinion. “I am basically a conservative hawk
with modest military service years ago under my belt. But this question, "Why
attack Iraq now?", has been bothering me recently. It seems to go against the
grain for us to be in a "first strike" role against a tinhorn dictator like
Saddam Hussein.
For possible clarification, I posed this question to a friend of mine from
church who is a retired USN Admiral and currently a well-connected Defense
Industry executive. I've also known him for 15 years and know him to be a smart,
levelheaded person, and church leader.
Here are his thoughts, but in my words.
Al Qaeda, Hamas and associated terrorists of the world are out to get the US
in a big way. They proved with the Sept 11 attack that they are capable of a
major strike. This just whetted their appetite for an escalation to the next
level.
There is a strong likelihood that the next level will not be a similar attack
that takes out 2,800 people but leaves no long-lasting damage. They will take
their time and likely go for a strike that will try to take out a major US city.
It could be a dirty bomb, with combination radiation and/or biological agents,
exploded near a major city, such as from a container ship in the Hudson River,
or San Francisco or Baltimore harbors. It would not even have to be unloaded,
and we don't have the technology to detect it in advance. And they are likely to
have several such strikes in the works, in case one or two are discovered.
We are talking about a “first strike” by them that will, for all practical
purposes, seem like a last strike to us. It will do so much damage to our
economy, and several hundred thousand people, that the war is over as far as the
terrorists are concerned, and they won. We will only be left to wonder who did
it and who to bomb in retaliation.
So the notion that we are not a “first strike” country becomes a death
sentence for us, if we allow this to happen first, before we take action. The
terrorists will have a very difficult time pulling this off without the help of
a small industrial complex. The current providers of such a complex to the
terrorists are Syria, Iran, North Korea and Iraq.
From among these, Iraq is the one with the most proven attempts to
develop weapons of the type that terrorists would like to have.
It is reasonable to think that our national leaders believe that we must
prove to all these countries that we are not going to sit by waiting on
Armageddon. We need to stop the terrorist supporters now, and we need to show
the other terrorist supporters what is in store for them if we feel we need to
hit them to protect our national interests.
Terrorists have no allegiance to a particular country, so they don't fear
retaliation by the US. The old cold-war standoff is no longer operative. The
terrorists probably consider a nuclear retaliation against one or more of these
supporting countries just the cost of war. They, and their supporting countries,
also know that the US will not just heave a few nukes onto a Baghdad in
retaliation, killing a couple of million innocent civilians.
The terrorists are also not members of the UN. Our discussions there are just
a comedy to the terrorists.
So the US must act now in every way possible to stop the possibility of such
an attack against the US. Part of that action is to deny the terrorists the
support of these rogue countries. If a rogue country's leadership is so unstable
that they might sell/give the terrorists the weapons, then we must stop it now.
Iraq is such a country. A measured, non-nuclear attack on Iraq may cause the
others to cease their support of the terrorists in such a dangerous way. It also
may cause the least civilian casualties of all the alternatives.
We must make it clear to the terror-supporting countries that there will be a
price to pay, and that a nuclear retaliation, which we are unlikely to use, is
not the only option open to us.
I think President Bush understands he cannot let a first strike happen, and
that nuclear retaliation is no longer a threat. We must go after the terrorists,
and their supporters and suppliers, now."
P.P.S. A history lesson from me:
Do you know why the US was in such a rush to develop the atomic bomb in WWII?
It's not because we simply wanted such a weapon. It's because concerned
physicists, including German refugee, Albert Einstein, warned Roosevelt in
writing that the Germans had the most capable physicist in the field of nuclear
physics, Nobel Prize winner, Werner Heisenberg, and he was known to have a
laboratory working on such a device. We knew what would happen if he was the
first to have such a weapon.
Think about it. I believe we are in a similar race today against the
terrorists. The war has begun, so the “don't go to war” crowd apparently has a
misunderstanding of what we are up against. We are at war today. Our country was
similarly divided just before Pearl Harbor and our entry into WWII. A modern-day
“Pearl Harbor” is likely a surprise that is unacceptable to us.
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