In article <
[email protected]>,
[email protected] says...
> On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 12:57:24 -0700, Mark Hickey wrote:
>
> > There was virtually nothing of substance done to influence Saddam to cave in to UN pressure.
>
> Although I don't often agree with Mark politically, he is right about this.
>
> On the other hand, neither the UN nor Bush are consistent on the issue. There are lots of brutal
> dictators left in the world, most of them drooling over the possibility of getting their hands on
> weapons of any sort, the nastier the better. North Korea comes to mind. But no one is suggesting a
> pre-emptive war on North Korea. The cynic in me suggests that the real difference is that Korea is
> not sitting on top of a sea of oil.
That's part of it, but only a small part. The real reason for attacking Iraq and not even discussing
attacking NK is two-fold:
1) Iraq has let it be known that they want to have more influence in the middle east (witness their
invasion of Kuwait); there is concern that with WMD's, they could coerce their other oil-rich
neighbors into doing Iraq's will, giving Iraq control of something like 50% of the worlds oil.
So it's not Iraq's own oil which is the reason, but rather the rest of the area's oil, which the
rest of the world needs. NK is not in that kind of situation to have a direct effect on our
national interest. If they tried to attack Japan, we would offer to help defend Japan, but the
Japanese can do a pretty good job of that themselves. If they decided to attach China, we'd just
sit back and watch while China turned NK into a Chinese province.
2) Iraq's military was *much* weaker than NK's. Iraq has a small, Korean War era military. NK has a
modern army larger than that of the US. An invasion of Iraq cost a few hundred of the invader's
lives. An invasion of NK would easily cost thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of lives
unless the attackers decided to just bomb them back to the stone age, in which case it would
only cost probably a few hundred planes shot down. The difference in cost to effect regime
change changes the political calculus to the point where we would never seriously invading NK.
> If you paid attention to the build-up to this war, the reason for war kept shifting. First it was
> a link to Bin Laden and his merry band, then when
I never heard that as a reason from the administration, as far as I can recall. Links to terrorism
in general, yes (which have found some supporting evidence, IIRC), but not to Al Qaeda.
....
--
Dave Kerber Fight spam: remove the ns_ from the return address before replying!
REAL programmers write self-modifying code.
