What does Pat Buchanan say about war with Iraq.

[Ducknut]

Costs of war already coming in

 

Posted: February 19, 2003

1:00 a.m. Eastern

 

? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

 

Had President Bush never used all that

barstool bellicosity about an Axis of Evil,

"pre-emptive strike," "regime change" and

"weeks, not months," he could now claim

victory in his showdown with Saddam.

 

For it is only through Bush's resolute

leadership that U.N. arms inspectors are back

in Iraq. With steady pressure, Bush could have

hundreds more swarming all over that country,

to where it would be inconceivable that

Saddam could mount an assault on his

neighbors.

 

Without war, Saddam could be back in his box.

But Bush set the bar for himself too high. Now,

though war is not necessary to contain Iraq,

Bush cannot pull back from it. To send 200,000

troops to the Gulf, then bring them home with

Saddam still in power, would cripple U.S.

credibility.

 

One wonders if the president ever asks

himself: Who got me into this? Who persuaded

me to surrender my freedom of action?

 

While the war has not yet begun, the costs are

already coming in. Europe is bitterly divided

and increasingly anti-American. NATO is split.

Tony Blair, a loyal ally, is in a hellish spot.

 

Polls show only one-in-10 Britons favor war

without a new U.N. resolution, and France will

veto any new resolution. And as the winter

window for war closes, France's position is

unlikely to change. For the anti-Bush posture

of Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister,

Dominique de Villepin, is wildly popular on

the continent.

 

Belgium, France and Germany may be isolated

inside NATO, but most Europeans back Paris,

Berlin and Brussels in the clash with

Washington. And with animosity toward Bush

soaring on the continent and across the Arab

and Islamic world, the U.S. ability to lead

through suasion is being lost. The drive for

hegemony is isolating America.

 

How can a new world order rooted in

American values be erected now, with George

W. Bush as architect? Not in recent memory has

an American president been so reviled abroad.

 

While this caricature is grossly unjust and in

large measure the work of anti-Americans

abroad, the president, his War Cabinet and the

War Party have contributed to America's

isolation. For this year-long campaign to paint

Saddam Hussein as the new Hitler ? a mortal

peril to the Middle East, America, the world,

even civilization itself, according to John

McCain ? with George W. Bush cast in the role

of Churchill, is just not believable. Sustaining

this fiction is taking a heavy toll on our

credibility.

 

First, there remains not a fiber of evidence

Saddam was involved in 9/11. Despite the

Stakhanovite efforts of our war propagandists,

the "Prague connection" between Mohammad

Atta and Iraqi intelligence proved nonexistent.

Colin Powell's indictment of Saddam's arms

violations now appears to have been

overdrawn. The British paper he cited was

hyped and plagiarized from academic

scribblings. The al-Qaida cell in Iraq seems to

be in territory controlled by our Kurdish allies,

not Saddam.

 

As for the tape in which bin Laden calls on

Iraqis to launch suicide attacks on invading

Americans, the White House claims this

conclusively ties Saddam to Osama. It does no

such thing. On the tape, bin Laden uses terms

such as infidel, apostate and socialist to

describe Saddam, for whom his affection is

comparable to that of the late Ayatollah

Khomeini for the novelist Salman Rushdie.

 

When it comes to aiding terrorists, Saddam is

not even in a league with Iran or Syria. His

missile capacity is inconsequential alongside

that of Iran or North Korea. His nuclear

program has been moribund for years, while

Iran is mining uranium and building reactors,

and North Korea is producing fissile material.

North Korea is the rogue state proliferator of

missiles, Pakistan the proliferator of nuclear

technology. Nor is Iraq the reason F-16s

over-fly our homes each night here in

Washington and we drive by Stinger missile

batteries on the way to work.

 

Nevertheless, it is Iraq against whom we are

going to war, and few in this city think the

president ? having sent all those troops to the

Gulf ? can now simply declare victory and get

out. No way. Delenda est Iraq. Iraq has to be

destroyed.

 

Yet, there is a sense here that this invasion of a

country that never sought war with us will

bring an end to the post-Cold world we knew

and vault us into a new era, the outlines of

which we cannot see.

 

Most of us, however, look to it with greater

foreboding than those neoconservatives who

now anticipate with wild surmise the war for

empire they have finally got.

 

 

 

Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the

Republican presidential nomination and the Reform

Party?s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and

editor of the new magazine, The American

Conservative. Now a commentator and columnist, he

served three presidents in the White House, was a

founding panelist of three national television shows,

and is the author of seven books

 

 

 

[Ducknut]

Come on Trask and Greg, don't disappoint me. You guys are strangely quite. It must be bad in Uber Repugnican Buchanan is the Prez. Or do you think that old Buchanan is still pizzed that he ain't Prez?

[glacierdog]

So we have inspectors in place. Are we just going to continue "inspecting" Iraq forever? It occurred to me the other day that the whole inspection process is a total waste of time. Saddam cannot be trusted, and he has shown his willingness to be the aggressor before. Why did we settle for inspections in the first place?

[sexual_chocolate]

Had to. Promises were made for allied support. Couldn't occupy.

 

Come on. So Saddam attacked a country 13 years ago. Yeah, I'm sure he's gonna be repeating that again soon! We go in, we inspect heavy duty for a year, get 'em clean (don't you know the US inspector declared 'em 95% disarmed in the mid-'90's?), and let 'em get back to normal.

[sk]

95% fuck that

 

my grandpa used to tell me "close counts in horse shoes and hores shit"

 

[sexual_chocolate]

So what's your thinking, muffy?

[sk]

how about, they can do better