[Vision2020] Antiwar Rallies/Attack Irag Now

[WMSteed@aol.com]

I received the following via e-mail this morning and thought it might create 
interesting comments/discussion on V2020.
Walter Steed



<<Listening and watching the "antiwar" rallies this past weekend made it seem 
we have folks that are doomed to relive the past.

Several months ago, I gave one of the ladies here in the office a short 
lesson in dirty bombs. She had no idea what this meant or what one of them 
could do to our nation. Believe me folks, this scenario scares me more than 
all the cold war issues of the 40 years from 1945 to 1986. At least the 
leaders of that era had something to lose if they were dumb enough to start a 
shooting war. Today's terrorist bandits have absolutely nothing to lose and 
everything to gain.

I am basically a conservative hawk with modest military service years ago 
under my belt.  But this question, "Why attack Iraq now?", has been bothering 
me recently.  It seems to go against the grain for us to be in a "first 
strike" role against a tinhorn dictator like Saddam Hussein.  For possible 
clarification, I posed this question to a friend of mine who is a retired USN 
Admiral. Here are his thoughts:

Al Qaeda, Hamas and associated terrorists of the world are out to get the US 
in a big way.  They proved with the Sept 11 attack that they are capable of 
major strike.  This just whetted their appetite for an escalation to the next 
level.  There is a strong likelihood that the next level will not be a 
similar attack that takes out 2,800 people, but leaves no long-lasting 
damage.  They will take their time, and likely go for a strike that will try 
to take out a major US city.  It could be a dirty bomb, with combination 
radiation and/or biological agents, exploded near a major city, such as from 
a container ship in the Hudson River, or San Francisco or Baltimore harbors.

It would not even have to be unloaded, and we don't have the technology to 
detect it in advance.  And they are likely to have several such strikes in 
the works, in case one or two are discovered.  We are talking about a "first 
strike" by them that will, for all practical purposes, seem like a last 
strike to us.  It will do so much damage to our economy, and several hundred 
thousand people, that the war is over as far as the terrorists are concerned, 
and they won.  We will only be left to wonder who did it and who to bomb in 
retaliation.

So the notion that we are not a "first strike" country becomes a death 
sentence for us, if we allow this to happen first, before we take action.

The terrorists will have a very difficult time pulling this off without the 
help of a small industrial complex.  The current providers of such a complex 
to the terrorists are Syria, Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

>From among these, Iraq and North Korea have the least stable leadership, and 
Iraq is the one with the most proven attempts to develop weapons of the type 
that terrorists would like to have.

It is reasonable to think that our national leaders believe that we must 
prove to all these countries that we are not going to sit by waiting on 
Armageddon.  We need to stop the terrorist supporters now, and we need to 
show the other terrorist supporters what is in store for them if we feel we 
need to hit them to protect our national interests.

Terrorists have no allegiance to a particular country, so they don't fear 
retaliation by the US.  The old cold-war standoff is no longer operative. The 
terrorists probably consider a nuclear retaliation against one or more of 
these supporting countries just the cost of war.  They, and their supporting 
countries, also know that the US will not just heave a few nukes onto a 
Baghdad in retaliation, killing a couple of million innocent civilians.

The terrorists are also not members of the UN.  Our discussions there are 
just a comedy to the terrorists.

So the US must act now in every way possible to stop the possibility of such 
an attack against the US.  Part of that action is to deny the terrorists the 
support of these rogue countries.  If a rogue country's leadership is so 
unstable that they might sell/give the terrorists the weapons, then we must 
stop it now.  Iraq is such a country.  A measured, non-nuclear attack on Iraq 
may cause the others to cease their support of the terrorists in such a 
dangerous way.  It also may cause the least civilian casualties of all the 
alternatives.

We must make it clear to the terror-supporting countries that there will be a 
price to pay, and that a nuclear retaliation, which we are unlikely to use, 
is not the only option open to us.

I think President Bush understands he cannot let a first strike happen, and 
that nuclear retaliation is no longer a threat.  We must go after the 
terrorists, and their supporters and suppliers, now.

A history lesson ~~ Do you know why the US was in such a rush to develop the 
atomic bomb in WWII?  It's not because we simply wanted such a weapon. It's 
concerned physicists, including German refugee, Albert Einstein, warned 
Roosevelt in writing that the Germans had the most capable physicist in the 
field of nuclear physics, Nobel Prize winner, Werner Heisenberg, and he was 
known to have a laboratory working on such a device.  We knew what would 
happen if Hitler was the first to have such a weapon.  Think about it.

I believe we are in a similar race today against the terrorists.  The war has 
begun, so the "don't go to war" crowd apparently has a misunderstanding of 
what we are up against.  We are at war today.  Our country was similarly 
divided just before Pearl Harbor and our entry into WWII.  A second modern 
day "Pearl Harbor" is likely a surprise that is unacceptable to us.>>