A very good thoughtful message.  As a father of three daughters, I can
assure you the excuse of so and so doing it first or similar doesn't work
here either.

However, that was not the point I was making.  I simply said that 4 years
ago, everyone was on board to remove Saddam Hussein, but after the sabers
were rattled, they were used ineffectively and promptly put back in the
scabbards, declaring a victory for the opponent.  I wanted to know what had
changed in the last 4 years that would make people who were ready to remove
Saddam change their minds.  Surely it could not be because he is less of a
threat now than he was then.  What is the difference?

Saddam like all bullies, is a coward.  Witness the lengths to which he goes
to protect himself, not the least of which is placing crew-served weapons
near schools, hospitals and in people's backyards.  Like all bullies, Saddam
does back down when confronted by adversaries who show resolve.  I was
thinking and hoping that since he was now facing a president who does what
he say he is going to do, and after the a**-kicking he got in the first Gulf
war, he would have second thoughts about his actions and he might either a)
run away to another country, b) actually disarm and really follow through on
his commitment or c) blow his brains out.

After the November elections where W performed brilliantly, regaining the
Senate and consolidating the Republican majority in the house, the UN
Security Council unanimously approved resolution 1441.  This resolution, in
case you have not read it, called for Saddam to declare all his weapons and
let inspectors in to verify their status.  It did not call for the
inspectors to go in and start looking for weapons in a massive shell game.
However, even before the inspectors were on the ground, some members of the
UN Security Council were trying to undermine resolution 1441.  They were
discussing what constitutes a "material breach" or if another resolution
would be required to attack, and so on.  Saddam recognized the divisions in
the council and also knew that his very good friend, Jacques Chirac was the
president of France, a permanent member of the Security Council.  I will not
go into conjectures regarding the sale of 8 German mobile bio-weapons labs
in the 1980s and all the precursor material and expertise also imported from
there.  Nor will I spend time discussing the huge contracts now underway
between Iraq and France, for oil. I certainly will not mention the need to
keep all this stuff secret from the world community.  Finally I will not ask
if you can spell the word blackmail.

At any rate, when the time came to produce the list of the weapons he has,
Saddam lied.  Surprise, surprise.  He said he didn't have anything and took
12,000 pages to do so.  The divisions within the Security Council started
showing at a greater rate.  When the inspectors finally went in, they were
taken around to various places, but you can well imagine that in 12 years,
Saddam learned how to hide his stuff.  The only thing he didn't want was U-2
overflights.

He recently acceded to letting the U-2 overfly Iraq, provided he is given 48
hours notice.  That takes away the entire element of surprise and any
possibility of getting "candid" pictures of the environment.

So far the inspections have proven that Saddam is in material breach of
1441.  He has not accounted for any of his weapons of mass destruction or
shown any proof that he has destroyed of dismantled them.  In the meantime,
ignorant people the world over are thinking the inspections are working.
The inspectors are going places and finding nothing.  Saddam must be telling
the truth and Bush must be lying.  Saddam, glued to the Censored News
Network hears all this and starts taking heart.  In December, the entire
Security Council, unanimously agreed to 1441 and he bluffed his way through.
He said he didn't have WMDs and the inspectors cannot find anything.  Now
people are falling for it everywhere, the Security Council is deeply
divided.  His bold gamble worked.

To top it all off, the Saddam support marches this past weekend told him he
was winning.  He thinks he is going to get away with it.  He believes world
opinion is totally against Bush, who wants his oil and behind him, as he
bravely resists the imperialist American warmonger.  Nowhere in the marches
did you see signs calling for Saddam to disarm, you only saw anti-Bush,
anti-American slogans.  Saddam is "co-operating" even less now, than before.
He knows he doesn't have to do so; he has sympathizers all over the world.

I would say because of the "peace marches," we are now going to go to in a
shooting war.  Saddam really thinks world opinion is behind him and that all
he has to do is resist and send his people to fight and die for a little
while.  If the Security Council had stood firm, rebuffing Saddam's ploys and
insisted, as a body, that he comply and threatening, as a body, full
military action if he did not do so, Saddam might be backing down now and
perhaps even be in exile.  However, that takes backbone and some countries
are notorious for not having one.  This whole thing could be over now, with
a minimum of shots fired, perhaps even none, if people had just stood firm.

Now, it may get very bloody



Denys

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