The Mercury News ran some of Fortney “Pete” Stark’s comments from the House floor on the Iraq resolution, omitting his reading of the Molly Ivins column blasting the President for the sin of being an “upper class white boy”; I’m guessing Fortney was told he resembles that remark himself. Here’s what they did run, with suitable commentary:
I am deeply troubled that lives may be lost without a meaningful attempt to bring Iraq into compliance with U.N. resolutions through careful and cautious diplomacy. The bottom line is I don’t trust this president and his advisers.
We — that’s the US and the UN — have already tried 11 years of careful and cautious diplomacy, embargoes, pressure, and conversation, Fortney, and it hasn’t accomplished a thing. Repeating an act while hoping for different results, is, well, nuts. So let’s not jump to the bottom line that our President is wrong for simply enforcing the measures that should have been enforced in 1998 when Congress last authorized force against Iraq.
Make no mistake, we are voting on a resolution that grants total authority to the president who wants to invade a sovereign nation without any specific act of provocation.
You yourself say, just a little further down, that Iraq attempted to assassinate an American President. While you don’t like that President’s party affiliation, most of us take this kind of aggression as seriously as you would take an attempt on the life of your president, Martin Sheen. Iraq has also attacked, 60 times, American and British jets lawfully policing the No-Fly Zones, and that’s aggression in anybody’s book because it subverts “careful and cautious diplomacy”. Iraq pays the families of suicide bombers, encouraging the murder of innocent people in Israel, more aggression, and it’s gassed, bombed and tortured its own people, the Kurds. What more do you need, little fellow?
This would authorize the United States to act as the aggressor for the first time in our history. It sets a precedent for our nation — or any nation — to exercise brute force anywhere in the world without regard to international law or international consensus.
You need to go back to school and study some history, Congressbubba; we were the aggressor in our Revolution, in the our Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even in World War II where we attacked Germany even though they didn’t attack us first. You can look it up. And our action to enforce the International Consensus embodied in the sixteen UN Resolutions Iraq has already violated isn’t chopped liver, dear one.
Congress must not walk in lockstep behind a president who has been so callous to proceed without reservation, as if war was of no real consequence.
The President perceives, rightly, that failing to act against Iraq is the option that has the most real consequences, and I doubt he cares whether you walk in lockstep or you dance a jig, as long as you do the right and honorable and intelligent thing.
Let us not forget that our president — our commander in chief — has no experience with, or knowledge of, war. He admits that he was at best ambivalent about the Vietnam War. He skirted his own military service and then failed to serve out his time in the National Guard. And, he reported years later that at the height of that conflict in 1968 he didn’t notice “any heavy stuff going on.”
So now you’re trying to tell us that Vietnam was a just war, and the President should have been on the front lines, where you weren’t? You need to make up your mind about that.
So we have a president who thinks foreign territory is the opponent’s dugout and Kashmir is a sweater.
So now we have to automatically shut out any President who happens to love baseball? While it may not be as refined as your avocations — macrame and character assassination — it’s a fine sport and one that most Americans enjoy. And I’m willing to wager that the President hasn’t worn a cashmere sweater in his life, while your closet is no doubt full of them.
What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?
Not a shred of evidence, well, except for the stuff the UN weapons inspectors found before they were locked out, and what the defectors told us about, and what the satellite pictures have shown, and the cell phone and fax intercepts, and the invoices, etc, etc, etc. That’s about a truckload of shreds.
Is the president’s need for revenge for the threat once posed to his father enough to justify the death of any American? I submit the answer to these questions is no.
See note above about aggression against an American President. You shouldn’t have brought this up, dim one.
The questions before the members of this House and to all Americans are immense, but there are clear answers. America is not currently confronted by a genuine, proven, imminent threat from Iraq. The call for war is wrong.
Your answers show contempt for the truth, as well as for our nation’s security.
And what greatly saddens me at this point in our history is my fear that this entire spectacle has not been planned for the well-being of the world, but for the short-term political interest of our president.
What disturbs me is that your tantrum isn’t calculated for political effect, but that you sincerely believe this stuff. For that alone, you should be hospitalized.
Now, I am also greatly disturbed that many Democratic leaders have also put political calculation ahead of the president’s accountability to truth and reason by supporting this resolution.
When the majority of Congress says the evidence supports the President, and a minority that includes KKK recruiter Bobby Byrd, Cuba lover Barbara Lee, and yourself says otherwise, I submit the majority is right.
But I conclude that the only answer is to vote no on the resolution before us.
This isn’t a conclusion, Fortney, because it doesn’t flow from the evidence — it’s more like an impetuous whim, and we don’t govern on that basis in this democracy. Sorry, but you don’t win the free pie.
Pete Stark is a Democratic congressman from Fremont
…which is a sad commentary on the voters in that part of the Frisco Bay area.
UPDATE: Cato the Youngest takes the Flying Iron Fisk to the full remarks Stark made on the floor, including the Molly Ivins (gee, does anybody take her seriously?) reference. Comments by readers point out that the US was also the aggressor in WW I, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya (twice) and arguably in Southeast Asia.
A very fine Fisking, Sir! Curious, is it not, how those who scream like gelded hogs at any criticism that comes within a country mile of doubting their patriotism have no hesitation at all hurling accusations of cowardice and duplicity at Bush and anyone supporting him on Iraq? The ad hominem attack has become their weapon of first resort.
Adding to your responses to Mr. Stark, you may want to refer to the first chapter of The Savage Wars of Peace, by Max Boot, which describes the US Navy’s attempts (successful) during Thomas Jefferson’s adminstration to put a stop to piracy against US merchant ships by the Barbary Coast pirates. President Jefferson sought no Congressional authorization (controversial at the time!) and there was a tenuous connection between the piracy and some of the ‘sovereigns’ attacked. The parallels are quite strong in other respects to US actions since 1945. Whether today’s policies are right or wrong, it is simply incorrect to say that they are unprecedented in US history.
The U.S. did not attack Germany without provocation in WWII. Germany and Italy both declared war on the United States first on December 11, 1941.
Actually the US was engaged in what were generally recognized as hostilities long before war was declared by Germany. I refer primarily to the “Neutrality Patrols” carried out by US Navy ships and aircraft which radioed the positions of U-Boats to British destroyers. Many of which destroyers were (hee-hee) Lend-Leased to the British. You might also wish to consider the American occupation of Greenland, a Danish territory, following the conquest of Denmark by the Nazi, on the authority of a single Danish former (after the conquest) diplomat. Courageous he was, but to the tea & crumpet set, this act was hardly that of a “neutral.” There are many more such examples, the whole “Lend Lease” fiction being only the most obvious.
In 1992, when Walter Mondale was running for president against Ronald Reagan he lost the South, which, prior to this time had been considered a safe democratic vote center.
Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta, former ambassador to the U.N. said that the reason that Mondale lost was that ?Smart Ass White Boys? ran his campaign.
So, is there a common theme here? Isn’t it remarkable that when certain “elites” are incapable of understanding the “bleeding obvious” they resort to names?
?Curiouser and curiouser?
We were the aggressor in the Civil War? Necessary but not sufficient condition: you accept the rebels’ constitutional theory that they could secede at whim. Another necessary but not sufficient condition: Lincoln’s decision to send food and supplies, but no reinforcements or ammunition, to Fort Sumter, was an aggressive act.
Most likely explanation: for you, “we” is the slaveowning rebels.
I concur with Mr. Martin. Germany and Italy declared war on us (i.e. the U.S.A.).
What aggression in the Cuban Missile Crisis? JFK’s “quarantine” solution would be a good model for Bush, if he wasn’t so excited about playing Napoleon.
Stark’s claim about Bush’s ANG record is not about whether Vietnam was a just war, but about whether Bush has any idea what war is and what he’s getting into. It’s telling, in this context, that the generals are far less enthusiastic about this war than are the chickenhawk think-tank veterans in the White House.
Re “shred of evidence:” You’re right. There are shreds of evidence. They just don’t add up to $100 billion and thousands of casualties.
Read the escalating shrillness of your “fisking” and ask yourself who’s throwing the tantrum?
Lastly: DON’T CALL IT FRISCO!
Context, context, context.
Have you read Rebuilding America’s Defences? Have you read the National Security Strategy document?
Those documents are BLOODY SCARY – an outright declaration of intent to be the only military power in the world.
Anybody denying that’s the contents of those documents, and that they’re authoratative?
OK. Now let’s take a look at Jose Padilla again. Yeah, the american citizen being held without trial. No charges, no trial. If there’s been a SNAFU – somebody got the wrong guy – we’ll never know, because there’s no appeal on presidential say-so. His case violates EVERY consitutional principle on which our nation was built.
So, yes, this guy is a little bit out of order, but the bottom line is that he’s in the right place – distrust of an Administration with such aggressive stated intent (READ THE DOCUMENTS, DON’T JUST SHOOT YOUR MOUTHS OFF) and DISREGARD FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES.
And yes, I’m yelling. I’m sick to death of self-serving clusters of conservatives patting the president on the back without paying any attention to what conservatives should consider important above all of the needs of the day: the constitution and the health of our democracy.
Out.
You’re right, Limerick and Lefty: First stop, Baghdad. Then, on to Luxembourg! Blast it all, how did you folks ever get so smart! We thought it would take you decades to figure that out!
A very nice fisking, indeed. I took a whack at Starkers, myself.
Riyadh delenda est!
Germany not only declared war on the US first, even more clearly they and the Japanese were the aggressors in WWII as they both invaded other countries without provocation to start the war (and with Germany, you can argue whether Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Austria constitutes the initial aggression); being a Neutral country in a war means you’re not engaging combat, not that you are impartial.
However, we were clearly the aggressors in Kosovo as we attacked another country without any threat to ourselves or any other country, nor did we try diplomacy etc. beyond issuing an ultimatum. And as vile a killer as Milosevic was, he had his counterparts amongst our allies in Bosnia and he doens’t hold a candle to Saddam (or some other current despots). We were the aggressors in Haiti, Panama, and Grenada just to provide some recent examples.
We have tried a “quarantine” of Iraq for 11 years with the only effect of generating bogus statistics about how American agression has killed a million Iraqi kids. We “quarantined” (the more technical term is embargoed) Japan over their aggression in China, and now revisionist historians like to claim we only brought WWII on ourselves for our “aggressive” act.
Also, a blockade, which is what our Cuban “quarantine” was, is an act or war. We were reacting to the stationing of nuclear missiles aimed at us — who’s the aggressor in such a situation?
I’m amazed how the left want’s to take the authority to make war out of Congress’s hands, and vest it with the Pentagon. That’s the logical conclusion to all this chickenhawk emotionalism. And while we’re at it, we should turn the department of interior over to the ranchers and loggers, since they are the ones with expertise in those fields, we should turn EPA over to polluters, since they are the ones with the expertise in that field, and we should turn the SEC completely over to big business.
Bush 2 is simply doing what Ford was afraid to do, enforce an armistice. Ford was prevented by congress from responding to and defeating the invasion of S. Vietnam, and he would not buck congress to live up to the US’s promises leading to the Paris Peace Accords. The beginning of the darkest period of defeatism since WWII. Regan returned western civilizations triumph. Bush 1 built on Regan’s success, but then bought into the multilateral claptrap and stopped short of unconditional surrender. The next 11 years of futility have been the result as the succeeding Clinton Administration and the UN have squandered all legitimacy in foreign policy. While the UN, born in The City, was an idealistic endeavor, it has devolved into a festering sinkhole of corruption.
Pete Stark does not believe in the US. He would like to cede our sovereignty to the UN. This would be turning over the world to a collection of envious european socialists and psychopathic second- and third-world despots, that easily form the working majority of that body. The UN is not part of the solution, but instead provides cover and legitimacy for the terror that Bush 2, and the US is now fighting.
Dr. L, I do agree that San Francisco is the preferred, and only legitimate, form of address for The City; with the sole exception of Marvin Gaye’s “Dock of the Bay”.
Chris, I think it was World War I that we went into after the Germans sank a passenger ship — the Lusitania. But not without one heck of a lot of debate, not the sham debate engineered by Tom Daschle.
Lefty,
Your arrogance cannot help the fact that you will probably lose every argument you ever try with people who actually read books, especially former lefties who had no logical choice but to switch sides after 9-11. Here are a few points that show why you should have stopped being leftist on 9-11 as well:
1) Osama (who was probably killed at Tora Bora and whose continued existence is probably now run by the CIA and the Bin Laden family as a way to coopt Al Qaeda) had said many times that he was frustated with the weak way in which Bill Clinton responded to Al Qaeda attacks or didn’t respond at all in the 90s. The escalation to 9-11 was a direct result of Clinton not starting the war on terror earlier. This is not an opinion. It is the fact of what Osama said. You need to take that at face value. Bush’s foreign policy was not to blame because he HAD NO POLICY in 2001! Or one could say that Bush was weaker than Clinton in early 2001, because Bush would cancel manoevers and empty embassies every time Bin Laden would come out with a threat.
So, in Osama’s own words, Al Qaeda was not going to respect any kind of weak response. This fact alone was the fatal blow for my ever voting democratic again.
2) Indeed, Osama specifically stated before the 9-11 attacks that his strategy was to get the USA fighting a Vietnam style war in Afghanistan that would result in enough casualties to create a massive anti-war movement in the USA which would break the will of the president and turn Congress into a circus of pacifists…thus allowing Al Qaeda to create an Islamic superpower centering its wealth on control of all the Persian Gulf oil and, thus, control of all of Europe.
Guess what? That means leftists were meant to be fifth column troops for the Islamists! That was the plan all along. What ahole could play into their hands like that? Not even Hillary Clinton, thank God. Leftists were meant to be what Lenin called “useful idiots”!
2) The leftists were, historically, the pro-war party in the USA until the mid-1960s when, arguably, the Soviet Union coopted the party for itself. Wilson, Roosevelt and JFK were the biggest war-mongers of the past century with Wilson’s intervention in World War One being the most morally questionable act of all (much less justifiable than JFK’s decision to live up to SEATO obligations by protecting the South Vietnamese from a sophisticated Chinese and Soviet backed minority insurgence). When JFK was killed by the Soviet trained Oswald, he had just given a speech in Fort Worth announcing that troops in Vietnam needed to be bolstered. The communists hated JFK because he stood in the way of the planned “flipping” of leftists everywhere to be at least friendly toward the Soviet Union.
But Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and Tony Blair to this day, realized that leftists no longer needed to be anti-war to be leftists, in a world without a communist enemy to feel sympathy with! So why does Lefty Libertarian seem to think that leftism is supposed to still be anti-war?? There is no logic connecting leftism to being anti-war. Remember that the Republicans were the anti-war party in WW1 and in WW2 and they were against the Kosovo action! Don’t go calling a war against right wing extremists and fascists a right wing cause, Lefty. You are leaving yourself high and dry with no idealogical cover, except for Vietnam.
3) Speaking of Vietnam, it was a successful attempt by SEATO allies (including Australia) to stop Chairman Mao from realizing his dream of killing every landowner and business owner in all of asia, especially in Thailand and Indonesia. Mao killed 30 million of his own people during the time when the French and Americans were in trying to save the Vietnamese from the same fate. The rate of killing actually went down in Indochina while the Americans were there. The anti-war movement was NOT responsible for our pulling out in 1972. Kissinger’s absolutely brilliant agreement to make friends with the new Chinese leaders led to the handshake that both superpowers would pull troops out of Indochina. In effect, we abandoned a SEATO ally in 1972 for the greater good of becoming strategic friends with China, which then also stood against the Soviet Union and replaced Taiwan on the Security Council (many people do not know that the USA prevented the Soviet Union from nuking China in 1969, when thousands of American troops were still being killed by Chinese made arms).
The leftist anti-war movement only really succeeded, by means of the Kent State incident, to convince conservatives that it wouldn’t be worth killing ignorant American college students (and executing their moronic professors), just to maintain our credibility for being willing to protect non-whites in Asia. Nixon calculated correctly that the Germans would still believe that we would protect them against a Soviet attack in Europe because the Europeans were white and, thus, worth protecting. Abandoning free SEATO non-whites to a life of slavery wouldn’t hurt our NATO credibility because of the inherent racism of our NATO allies.
Americans say we “lost the Vietnam War” because of the way we abandoned people in order to satisfy self-centered and self-righteous morons who were starting to throw rocks at other Americans. But, considering the still strategic friendship we have with China, Kissinger’s deal meant that the war really achieved its main aim, that of containing Mao. Sadly, Osama attacked the WTC because he believed the leftist claim that the anti-war movement made the Americans leave Vietnam in and of itself. So the only real legacy of the leftist anti-war movement of the sixties was 2800 dead in 2001. He didn’t realize that Americans would be much more willing to stomach a dozen Kent States, than allow an Islamic superpower to rise in the Persian Gulf. And, of course, he didn’t realize that Afghanistan was no Vietnam…and that war is over by the way, even if 10 Americans get shot per year for 4 years, Afghanistan will remain just a side show, no longer a war.
More thoughts:
4) The Crusades were basically a defensive move and a move to take back territory recently taken away from Christians, the Crusades were no more morally reprehensible at the beginning than the American invasion of Normandy (the sacking of Constantinople was downright sick, however). The Islamists were then on an imperialistic march of conquest that they were to be winning until 1689. For Muslims to demand in 2002, that the Pope apologize for their own agression is the height of unashamed hypocrisy similar to when the Soviets spread the rumor about JFK supposedly wanting to pull troops out of Vietnam.
5) American troops are in Iraq right now, fighting without air support in an unspoken agreement with Saddam that they will take losses and not launch bombing raids until after Saddam officially announces that the imperialists are attacking him.
In other words, American men are dying so the leftists of the world don’t have a hissy fit about our bombing innocent countries.
Hopefully, the undeclared ground war will work so much in our favor that Saddam will catch a bullet before he is smart enough to announce to the world that the evil Bush has attacked him.
By the way, the really serious casualties we might face from any open war, which will be fought as part of an opposition uprising alongside French, Turkish and other arab troops, is that New York or another American city might be suitcase nuked. The only good leftist argument against war is that it might already be too late. Hillary Clinton became the only leftist to win my respect yesterday, when she announced that she was worried that it may already be too late.
An excellent Fisking. Do you suppose it’s time to lump Fortney’s shrill nonsense in with that of Baghdad Bonior and fellow-travellers, who evidently believe that Saddam Hussein is trustworthy, while Bush is not?
I forgot to add that the Cambodian “killing fields” horror must be added, along with the WTC attacks, as an example of the legacy of the socalled “anti-Vietnam-war” movement. By 1978, those sixties leftists who were not honest enough to realize that they had been wrong in supporting Ho Chi Minh and the communist movements of Indochina, tried to excuse the Khmer Rouge for having been made to “go crazy” because of all the American bombs that had been dropped in Cambodia half a decade earlier. This is just one example of how some leftists are so psychologically filled with hate towards conservatives, that they will desperately make up any excuse to refute direct evidence that they were terribly wrong. The leftist media, to this day, does not itself recognize just how wrong they were during the Vietnam War. Even Walter Cronkite and Bobby Kennedy had believed in 1968 the Viet Cong National Liberation Front’s promise that they wanted only a parliamentary democracy in South Vietnam. At least history will remember that the Phoenix Program wiped out the Viet Cong very efficiently. The Phoenix Program was the precursor to what has been happening around the world to influential terrorist sympathisers over the past 8 months while the foolish leftist media, who admittedly might be actually helping Bush, have paid attention only to the Iraq smokescreen.
Most of the Viet Cong liars, who were friendly with American troops by day and killed them by night, never got the chance to live to see how the North Vietnamese regulars communized everything. They mostly died in their beds as a result of a captured North Vietnamese document.
Getting back to the smokescreen concept: it is entirely possible that leading leftists and leading leftist media like the NYTimes, are participating with Bush in conducting a Normandy invasion style “bodyguard of lies.” By pretending that there will be an “official televized attack on Iraq complete with the usual bombing”, they divert the world’s attention that American troops are winning over Iraqi troop loyalties and moving closer and closer to Saddam on the ground. Won’t the leftists look stupid if there is no invasion, just a three day revolution, based on ground work conducted by the CIA over the past four months, complete with crowds waving American flags…followed by a quick revolution in Iran complete with crowds waving American flags.
In 1940, Adolf Hitler issued orders to his submarine commanders to take special care not to provoke American naval vessels or to attack commerical shipping. We aggressively attacked his submarines, send Marines to Iceland to relieve the British and to Greenland to attack German weather stations, “lent” the Brits 50 destroyers and initiated Lend Lease. The mixed crew of the American-furnished PBY, that located the Bismarck for the final kill in April 1940 was piloted by an American Naval officer.
Jennet Conant’s recent book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-5658290-1307356 about Alfred Lee Loomis, the reclusive financier-scientist, tells of the massive American-British scientific and industrial cooperation initiated in the fall of 1940.Loomis’ teams at the MIT Rad Lab, cooperating with American industry and other academic institutions, developed and manufactured critical anti-submarine and anti-aircraft radar and navagation technology that was implemented by the British well before Pearl Harbor.
Beginning in 1940,British intelligence lead by Sir William Stephenson,”The Man Called Intrepid” http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-5658290-1307356 operated freely against the Germans in the United States in cooperation with the FBI with approval of the details (killing and blackmailing people, intercepting mail, spreading disinformation) by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In short,under a Democratic president, we waged undeclared war against the Germans for over a year before Pearl Harbor in the finest tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
Other points: the best proof that Bush is not doing this of oil, is that the Russians and the French (who were promised two thirds and one third of Saddam’s oil reserves respectively) have not been able to be “easily bought off” by the USA precisely because the USA knows it has no right to negotiate what will happen to Iraqi oil after a decmocracy is created. If Bush was a real Napoleon, and had no plans to democratize Iraq, he would have had France and Russia in his back pocket last January with a straight oil-for-UN-backing deal. Russia and France are still quite imperialistic, judging from the way that they have been trying to get the sanctions dropped so they could start to benefit from selling oil that rightfully belongs to the Iraqi people.
World War Two was not only a preemptive attack against Germany, it was a preemptive attack against the idea that the Soviet Union would beat the USA in getting the budding German technologies that led to nuclear weapons, rocketry and the jet engine later on, among other things. The American democratic party, in the days when it was a decent party, basically launched a war back then to rape a dictatorship of some good scientists and high tech, as well as turn them into a bunch of bleeding heart liberals (cattle). Never mind the fact that Hitler declared war on the USA a few hours before Congress declared war on him. He only did so because of his pact with Japan. It was only a formality by then anyway. The USA was fighting the war by the time it took Greenland. We were not going to leave Canada and Newfoundland (still a separate country back then) alone.
FRISCO! FRISCO! FRISCO!
oh Sorry.
‘FRISCO! ‘FRISCO! ‘FRISCO!
I notice that most of the Bush bashing comments come from people using psuedonyms. How typically gutless.
Lefty Lib –
I have read both documents.
One comes from a private thinktank. It recommends pursuing a defense budgeting strategy to ensure that the US stays number one in the defense arena.
The NSS document comes from the office of the President, and lays out a more comprehensive strategy for maintaining US primacy – through the military, support for free trade, and diplomatic support of freedom and democracies throughout the world.
What’s so scary about that?
You don’t want the US to be #1? Maybe #2? #70?
#198?
Where should we be?
Uhm, that was Ottis Redding!!
Marvin Gaye, sheesh, if you had listened to them you’d be able to tell them apart!
Redding recorded “Sittin on the Dock of the Bay”, and then (Doh!) got on a small airplane that crashed (note to musicians: Avoid Small Planes!)
Oh and isn’t The City that little old financial district in London? 🙂
Righty Libertarian,
I would like to point out that George McGovern attempted to introduce a bill in Congress to invade Cambodia when it became clear what Pol Pot was doing.
Dr.L,
Such a nice, selective reading of history. First off, the ?quarantine? was really a blockade. Calling it a ?quarantine? didn?t change the fact that it was a blockade, and a blockade is an act of war. The Cuban Missile Crises wasn’t resolved by only JFK’s “quarantine” solution. It was resolved because Nikita Khrushchev was convinced that America would fight a nuclear war before we would allow missiles in Cuba. Absent that threat, Khrushchev would have simply ignored the blockade.
Are you suggesting such a threat be made? There is nothing in your post to indicate that you are, but it is a rather intriguing option. Instead of threatening invasion, we could give Saddam Hussein a 48-hour ?window of opportunity? to surrender himself for trial on war crimes charges, open Iraq fully to inspectors, free political prisoners, etc. (i.e. comply with the Gulf War Cease Fire, with some penalties for violating it). While we let the clock wind down, we warm up a Peacekeeper, crank the dial-a-yield to max, input the launch parameters, etc. on live television. With a countdown running in the lower right-hand corner.
That would be a hell of a lot more pressure than we put on Khrushchev. The only problem with that is that if Hussein didn?t comply we would have to follow through on our threat. I don?t believe that he would comply. I believe he would bet that we were bluffing. And we couldn?t afford to be bluffing.
I somehow suspect the Iraqi populace would prefer invasion to nuclear annihilation. Call it a hunch.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is really not a good analogy of what we face today. The Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 is a better parallel. We could have fought a conventional, or, at worst limited nuclear war against the Soviets, and defeated them before they developed the nuclear weapons with which they were able to threaten massive retaliation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wouldn?t that have been better than 40 years of Cold War? 40 years where we essentially held the Soviet?s entire population hostage against their ?good? behavior, and the likewise held our population hostage against our ?good? behavior (I put good in quotes because it basically meant that there was an uncertain line which, once crossed, we all die. They didn?t call it MAD for nothing).
We know that Saddam Hussein wants to acquire nuclear weapons, and it is virtually certain that he will acquire them if we continue with the futile path we have been on for the past 11 years. Violation of a cease fire is usually casus belli for resumption of hostilities. The fact that we have ignored it for four (really more like ten) years is irrelevant. There is no statute of limitations. Hussein can either abide by the terms of the cease fire, or face the resumption of hostilities.
The choice is really up to him.
“Repeating an act while hoping for different results, is, well,
nuts” precisely what the left and the Dems do all the time.Outside of lying, it is what they do best.
It is, after all, the idea that counts, not the results.
These analogies between Iraq Attack and the Cuban Missile Crisis miss a significant point of difference. Castro ALREADY HAD nuclear weapons, and Saddam does not yet have them. If Castro in October 1962 had not had nukes but was known to be on the point of acquiring them, Kennedy would probably have invaded Cuba. That would have been a close analogy to the present situation.
As it was, Castro did have the nukes and a blockade was sufficient to force him to abandon them. Why would not the same thing work against a nuclear-armed Iraq? It would not work because the Soviets, who were calling the shots in 1962, had no reason to risk nuclear war. They could simply take their missiles and go back to the Soviet Union. Saddam can’t go anywhere. He would probably risk nuclear war.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK told Cuba to disarm or face a nuclear attack. He disarmed.
The whole country was tense while this played out, because it wasn’t at all clear that Castro and Krushchev had the sense to disarm, and nobody doubted JFK was ready to launch the Big One.
Nobody.