I'm not saying you should think that, Storman - I'm just saying that there was a price to pay no matter which way you went. It was, as Crow points out, a Hobson's Choice. Who's to say that war could have been avoided in 2003 without the expense of having to fight a larger war at some future date?

Sure you did... but there's a big difference between walking the walk and talking the talk. What would you have done if Saddam had launched a dirty nuke at the Saratoga? Nuke Baghdad?!?

Ahhh... But you've got a substantial US military presence in South Korea - you didn't in Kuwait until after the Gulf War. You'd have to react to an attack in Korea - that wasn't the case in Kuwait.

The present Bush Administration is the most warlike that you've had in a while, and yet even they're still hesitant about mixing it up with North Korea. What makes you think any other President would?

Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister of the UK in 1936 and predecessor of Neville Chamberlain. He's widely viewed as "the Father of Appeasement", having set the policy foundations upon which Chamberlain was to follow. He was Churchill's arch-rival within the Conservative party of the 1930's.

And because Iraq was the country who fought most of the world's major powers only 12 years previously that made all the difference?

But Red China wasn't a member of the UN at that point in time and so it was outside of it's purview. Besides, even if the US sought to expand the conflict to China with another Security Council Resolution, it would have been vetoed by the Soviets.

Again, though, that all depends on your assessment of Khrushchev's intentions.

*L* Everybody chooses Churchill, but they aren't willing to make the tough choices that he was. I think Churchills are rare, Storman. I know I'm not one - it's my tendency to handle a situation according to the circumstances at the time and not what they could be down the road. I'm definitely a Baldwin.

Baldwin saw German rearmament as no different from what any other country does... was that worth a war? So Germany violated Versailles and occupied the Rhineland... but wasn't that their own back yard anyway?

Chamberlain came into office and the re-armed Germany occupied Austria... oh well, Hitler was Austrian anyway, wasn't he? Then he occupied the Sudetenland...but what the hell? They're Germans too. Then he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. *sigh* Oh well, there's nothing we can do - they're already too powerful to fight without another major war... is Czechoslovakia really worth another war?

Churchill though... Churchill would have kicked Hitler's ass in the Rhineland, consequences be damned. And he would have been raked over the coals for it, too. But he would have done it. And you know what? I think if he were President, he would have exactly the same thing as Bush did on Iraq. Consequences be damned.

Still think you're Churchill?

So you would have essentially continued Clinton's policies?

Except he couldn't. France and Russia were already violating the embargo and were going to bring it down when it came up for renewal.

I've got a couple of problems with that, Crow. If you occupied the no-fly zones, the first thing the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south would do is declare independence. How much do you figure the Turks would appreciate the prospect of an independent Kurdish state? I figure about as much as the Saudis and Kuwaitis would appreciate a fundamentalist Shiite State with close ties to Iran on their northern border.

So where do you figure on launching your invasion from? Even you got Turkish and Saudi support by promising to block them from declaring independence, you'd still have to fight the Kurdish and Shiite "freedom fighters". What do you think Saddam is going to do in his Baathist rump state? If I were him, I'd funnel as much weaponry as I could to the rebels against the occupiers.

Would you really be better off under your plan?

Your direction is presupposed on them unilaterally declaring that. I am not so sure they would....so I cannot answer the direction you are projecting down.

In this land of 'what if' I can say, through tough negotiations & working through the U.N they could get them to submit through carrot & stick incentives to not 'rock the boat' as it were & the coalition could then continue down the path of strangling the Iraq regime.

__________________
The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.
- Jack Handy

Of course Saddam was their "muscle" - and so long as the US was willing to offer them protection, why shouldn't the Saudis and Kuwaitis be willing to fight to the last American? But what about if Saddam was allowed to become so powerful that the price you'd have to pay to deal with him down the road itself became a deterrent to dealing with him? The key, as far as the Saudis and Kuwaits were concerned, was to have Iraq be powerful enough to be a safeguard against Iran, but not so powerful that the Americans would shy away from confronting him.

Wasn't Bush on vacation when Iraq invaded? I was in Aldershot at the time, so I didn't see a whole lot of TV coverage... but from what I did see later, his initial reactions to Iraq's invasion were confused and contradictory. It seems to me that if he were ready and prepared for an Iraqi invasion, he'd have a plan ready to go.

It went way beyond the al-Samood missiles, though. Read Dr. Blix's January 27, 2003 testimony before the Security Council, Meeting No. S/PV.4692. There were still outstanding all of the key unresolved issues outlined by the Amorim Report.

Exactly... The CIA's Duelfer Report outlined exactly how ineffective the sanctions had become.

Why wouldn't they declare independence, Crow? Once you cut them free from Saddam's regime, what reason would they have to owe their allegiance to Baghdad?

Who are you going to negotiate with, Crow? Shiite and Kurdish leaders? Wouldn't he very fact that they had leaders at all indicate that they saw themselves as entities separate from Baghdad?

Pretty much. After 9/11, I would have leveled Tora Bora and called it a day.

If France and Russia were violating the embargo, why didn't we violate the embargo? Or did we?