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"Who you gonna believe? That lying, cheating, dirty rat foreigner Hussein, or that nice respectable American guy Colin Powell? If we don't take him down soon, who knows what he might do to us in the future? How much time should we give him before we lower the boom?"
And, once again, she blows out the flames of male testosterone with simple logic, "This is not now, and never has been, about who is lying, who is telling the truth. In matters of warfare, EVERYONE lies and cheats. It is about thousands of human beings being shot or blown to bits."
Willy, slightly mollified, but not quite ready to surrender, responds, "But, if we wait until later, even MORE people may be killed or maimed! Sure, there is danger he will use those weapons against our troops if we invade now, but then everyone will know we have been telling the truth all along."
Gypsy calmly continues, "As long as Saddam continues to play the innocent victim of American imperial ambitions, HE CAN NOT USE those weapons that WE assure the world that he has. The moment he initiates the use of chemical or biological weapons against us or ANYONE else, we can and will retaliate in force, and NO ONE will oppose us. Why not just keep the pressure on him? We can back our allies...Russia, France, Germany and China...in calling for more inspectors with more freedom to intrude, giving them as much time as they need. The longer we wait, the weaker will become the argument that America will invade no matter what, our Achilles heel."
She reminds Willy that he personally was once a Bad Guy, at least according to the U.S. government. While he was a drug offense fugitive for two and a half years, the F.B.I and D.E.A. never came close to finding him. However, the pressure they put on his family and friends plus the pressures of maintaining a life of deception and relative poverty, eventually induced him to give himself up and take his medicine. Why won't the same pressures eventually work their magic on the Iraqi people, on Saddam himself?
Still not ready to completely surrender, Willy asks, "But, what about terrorists? What if Saddam...or North Korea, for that matter...gives some of their WMD's to those guys? Surely THEY have no compunction about using them!"
"Why," Gypsy, asks in rebuttal, "would either of those countries trust the terrorists any more than we do?"
"Yes, but reasoning that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend,' they would have every reason to pass them on. Why WE even gave al Qaida weapons when they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan!"
"Making my point...", concludes Gypsy quietly.
Indeed, why are we setting ourselves up to be the enemy of every errant dictator and petty tyrant in the world? The more we involve ourselves in diplomacy by threat, the more we are hated, the more likely it is that the very things we fear most will happen. There is an old saying that it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and prove beyond all shadow of doubt that you are. Bush, and his agitated friends should keep this in mind.
Instead, they appear to be engaged in a contest with Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il and Ariel Sharon to see who can be the most pig-headed, destructive and just plain dumb. Like Israel, we seem to be bent on a path of self-destruction, daily issuing dire prophecies and then assuring by our very actions that they will come true.
Another recent addition to the self-fulfilling-prophecy merry-go-round arose from Rumsfeld's arguments with our newly ordained punching bags, German and France. Will these two countries come to the aid of Turkey if it is attacked by Iraq...as is clearly spelled out in the NATO treaty to which all are signatories? Of course, this blarney conveniently overlooks the fact that the only reason that Turkey is at risk of such an attack is their recent reluctant decision to allow American forces to stage in Turkey for the Northern front in an American attack on Iraq! Oh, me oh my, what tangled webs we weave...
This is not to say that we should let down our guard and stop defending ourselves, just that threatening pre-emptive strikes on our PRESUMED enemies can hardly be characterized as defense. We would surely detest a world in which one could be arrested for rape merely for possessing the means...a penis and strong arms for example...to carry out a rape. Why then should we hurry to create a world where a nation can be punished for what it MIGHT do? North Korea, ever one to be imitative of the Big Boys, is now engaged in very similar tactics threatening pre-emptive attack on the U.S.! Wherever did they learn such things?
World War II was not started by desperately weak nations lying and cheating, but rather by super-powers "certain" that they could win the ensuing struggle against those other "inferior" nations. The German and Japanese people...and, yes, the French and Russians as well...learned a hard lesson in that conflict. When will we?
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