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 PRELIMINARY RESPONSES
TO POWELL'S ADDRESS

February 6. 2003


1 The
US and the world have buried the horror of 9/11 out of memory and will try to keep it there.  Powell's revelations reopened horrific possibilities and we already see people going into denial as fast as they can change the subject.

2 The ingenuity and finesse now being refined to conceal mass weapons can easily be exported to other anti-US parties, or simply sold on international terrorism's  EBay.  Saddam is strengthening his asynchronous warfare capabilities and he can easily sell these in any cargo container that can haul a truck or rail car.  We might expect to see such a shipment into
Yemen that we nobly do not stop.

3 Is Saddam linked to bin Laden?  In October of 2001, the Enquirer reported that Mohammed Atta and a few of his associates  had met personally with Saddam one month before 9/11.  Of course, we certainly know that Saddam relished 9/11, as did many Palestinian militants.  The Enquirer also reported that the anthrax that shut its offices down had been mailed from Iraq, and that a prior test mailing had been done 6 months before that to test the mail route.  The world underestimates the care and discipline with which bin Laden operatives are prepared to test and perfect their methods, as the educated engineers so many of them are.  I believe there is linkage, opportunistic linkage, between Saddam and bin Laden.  It's not Saddam's main focus but it could become so as he grows more desperate in his last Hitler-in-the-bunker throes.

4
Iraq has no intentions of disarming.  It feels it has nothing to gain.  Now too much prestige and credibility is still being given to the Inspection Team.   We already have our answer.  Iraq is not disarming.  The Inspection Team can have no meaningful purpose as long as Iraq so flagrantly eludes it.  The Team by its nature is reactive, and quite ineffectual. The purpose of the team was to verify disarmament.  Three is nothing to verify.  If it were not for US and other intelligence, none of this -- the mobile nerve gas and chemical factories, the cleaning out of depots just prior to inspectors' arriving, and the continual attempts to purchase missing links for a nuclear bomb -- would be known.

5 Is it not likely that even more of
Iraq's munitions will be moved underground?  Look at Afghanistan's extensive cave systems.  Iraq's military is financed with international food payment oil money.  They can build even bigger and more extensive caves.  They already had huge underground bunkers in 1990.  The US should get control of Iraq to learn about all these underground fortifications, and  destroy them.

6 It is difficult even to conduct surveillance on
Iraq because of a shortage of Arabic language talent within government employ.   This will not soon change.  Do we want to give these scarce resources expanded mischief to try to chase?

7 Saddam is becoming more of a menace every month, not less.  There is no process of whittling him down, nor will there be.

8 The UN will never confront Saddam and truly enforce  disarmament because it is weak and incapable of doing so. The UN cannot and will not enforce its resolutions against
Iraq's weapons.   Disarmament will only occur due to invasion by the US and its allies.   Greater Arabia has not controlled its own and we cannot allow this loose canon to go on lurching about the deck.

9 Furthermore, the UN doesn't care sufficiently about
Iraq because the US was attacked and it sees the US as the lightning rod that is going to take all the heat.

10 The most important decision to be made now is how to administer
Iraq following its defeat.  They certainly aren't going to self-govern.    Perhaps we put China in there to do a Hong Kong number on them.  If the UN doesn't take a hand in disarming Iraq, they should have no hand in administering the conquered stump afterwards.  The stump belongs to the invaders.

11 Economic democracy in Greater
Arabia must be a major international goal.  The intelligent terrorists who work internationally have been recruited from educated classes who have experienced unending poverty despite their intelligence and skills.

12 The
US needs a public accounting of undercover provocations and other aggression against the Arab world by the CIA and its operatives.  The US needs to have publicity of how it is seen as an aggressor by Greater Arabia, and why.  Noam Chomsky's 9/11 may not have been a perfect book but it points to important problems.

13 Possibility:  Plan the division of
Iraq into Iraq and Kurdistan.  Colonize Kurdistan (another Afghan terrorist-bought-off warlord state in the making).  Plan that the administration of Iraq be split between the US and China.  It'll give us a common project and set things up for the gutting of the North Korean military next fall.

14 A military confrontation is inevitable because Saddam does not engage with the rest of the world but has a bunker mentality--always has, always will.

15 Saddam will never disarm or abdicate. His military dominance is how he sees himself and how he demands that others see him.  He came up through security forces and he is a smalltime brutalizer writ large.  Saddam will likely continue to starve and repress his people and disallow food that would half-fill Iraqi bellies and possibly give strength for a rebellion.  Like Hitler, Saddam is surrounded by yes men and always will be because that's what he insists on.  He is in no way a world citizen and cannot be rehabilitated.  His great pleasure is repression and domination.  As usual, the world is letting one male's endocrine system make miserable the lives of millions who are at his mercy.

16 Saddam is protected partly by the Aristocracy Ethic in our nation and in our world:  "might, if not making right, should always get a hands-off response".  To cross this boundary would expose other corrupt, tyrannical and self-serving tyrants.  The UN is full of these.

17 It is time to treat the Iraqi regime arbitrarily, completely as we decide.  The posture of Iraq's being asked permission of to fly U2 missions over it, is like Spanky asking Butch to avoid Our Gang when coming home from school so as not to be tempted to beat them up.

18 Hussein should no longer be offered asylum or other buy offs.  Both he and hard-core loyalists should immediately be killed:  i.e., assassinated.  They only have one purpose, and it is illegitimate.  Hussein's dictatorship is worth smashing alone on the grounds of its repressiveness and torture anyway.  Hussein is a cur dog and we are watching him bite lambs full of hydrophobia,  and it is time he were shot.  If he gets on the international media stage of war crimes trials, he will suffer the horrible fate of international publicity and glorification, a soapbox from which to crow, as did Milosevic, and the horrible and effective punishment of confinement in a HoJo for 20 years with ACLU-mandated Internet access from which to exercise his First Amendment self-exoneration rights until he can get himself out and on Oprah or invited to speak at Oxford like OJ.  After W.W.II, the Japanese high command was all hung -- 400 of them.   I would have preferred tranquilizers followed by lethal injection, but somebody had the right idea.

19 We have the chance now to kill limited numbers of large nests of roaches.  If we fail to kill them, they will overrun planet earth and suicide killings will be our fate for the next 100 years.  Right now we have the chance to get into the seedbed of future terrorism and learn how they're doing it.

20 Expect Saddam to use "human shields" as in 1991, to exploit the news business as well and also to exploit frustrated radical left elements who are still upset at the USSR's collapse as a status blow to their dream of collectivism.  American movies and TV provoked a lot of the third world jealousy we see, anyway, so it is natural to go to those sources for power in time of vengeance. 

21 The peace movement, as in
Viet Nam, will never get out any useful or potent messages since it is dominated by an attitude more than by evidentiary reason.  Never do you get their proposals for actual handling of any of this, and because of that they are incapable (due to the lack of structure, typical of the US Radical Left, and their emotional constituency, with its many insulated Hollywood personalities leading the charge).  From them we will get only obstructionism, tantrumming, and political ostrich behavior, except "civil disobedience".  Peace movements are reactive.  Where is proactive peace as a detailed and convincing proposal?

22 The cries of "it’s only about US oil companies" are illegitimate.  There are always commercial implications from everything done in
Iraq.  That is how and why Saddam has power--because of oil money.  That is why Russia held out, and France still does--there are oil contracts in place with them.

23 You can be sure that any unprevented attacks on any
US interests will be laid more at the door of Bush than of the attackers by people who are terrified for the US to actually possess the mantle of power.

24 Prior to all of this, "no-first-strike policies" were in place because we were buffered.  Oceanic isolation and non-suicidal militaries were the rule.  But now there is no defense against a determined suicidal zealot except neutralization of the zealot.  If
Iraq didn't help bin Laden before, it surely will now.  It's got some advance revenge to wreak.  Besides, Hussein's buildup, in defiance and deception, is aggressive.

25 The
US is the only superpower because it has the most robust political and economic system.  The US should never dumb down its power to appease nations that have taken weaker routes and that are more divided politically so as not to be able to get power.  True power must be taken.  If you try to prop up weak papier mache power structures, such as Afghanistan's sham government, they collapse.  Power is not like money, something that can be conferred.  It is like muscle, that must be built up.

26 The rich and powerful (the
US) are always hated because there is a mob mentality in people who are unmotivated by ideals because of being denuded of hope.  You see this on the micro level by vicious BS on Jerry Springer and in malicious tabloid gossip, marketed to the lowest social strata.  Success will always find noxious detractors and scavengers who want to rip off their piece of grudge flesh.

27 Colonize
Iraq.  It is true that Middle Eastern countries go for the Strong Man governments.  Is not Saddam the worst of these?  Strong Man systems are a sign of the immaturity and political non-engagement of the peoples of those countries as a whole, not the result of any kind of conscious choice. The people are divided and conquered psychically in all these countries.  After Japan was bombed at the end of WWII, they came to worship the ground the US walked on because Asians worship raw power.   The Iraqis, and possibly the Arabs, may well do the same.

--Robb Murray,
February 6, 2003

 

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