licentious radio

Thursday, January 30, 2003
[10:23:24 AM]

Ha ha. Laura Bush had to cancel her big poetry symposium. Hey now, you think Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman wouldn't be for invading Iraq?

Turns out the poets who were going to show up were paid by Iraqi infiltrators to read peace poems. Can't have peace poems at the White House.... That Saddam sure is sneaky.

[10:15:38 AM]
Isn't it truly sublime that the people who *want* to attack Iraq are all people who dodged the draft and avoided any contact with war?

Here's a British newspaper commentary that labels the Bush gang as the new Third Reich, and also illustrates the horror of warfare:

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'In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.

'The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".'

[10:08:44 AM]
In Poppy's Gulf War, the US never did find Iraq's Scud missiles. Despite relentless propaganda, it eventually turned out that the "Patriot" anti-missile system didn't work at all, and Israel was saved because the Scuds fell apart on their own.

*If* Saddam has some really bad stuff, he can't actually *use* it, ordinarily. For example, in his dreams he might want to VX Tel Aviv, but he knows Israel has enough nukes to spoil the fun.

So now lets say the Americans surround Baghdad. Who's Sharon going to nuke now? (Besides Arafat....) Once American troops are committed to invasion, deterrence mostly goes away. But when American troops are fully engaged, deterrence goes away completely.

Will threat of war crimes prosecution deter Iraqi officers? Think of your city being bombed, your neighbors killed. Not a one-time attack like 9/11, but ongoing -- day after day there is no place to hide, no escape, no food, no water, no medical care. Just death, destruction, and more death. After your wife and children have been killed, are you going to care if their murderers threaten you with a war crimes trial?

The potential for spreading mayhem throughout the Middle East is huge, once the war is on.