MUGGER's Argument

MUGGER (Russ Smith) formerly of the New York Press, explains how he sees Bush's policy as our "only hope" against terrorism.

Other than the fact that nowhere in his column does he consider, you know, trying to reduce the presence of Arab Muslims in the West (or at least better screening), there is also the fact that he doiesn't really make the case that the removal of Saddam reduced terror all that much.

He brings up the $25,000 Saddam paid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (which everyone seems to bring up). I hate to point this out, but (a) that's not a lot of support and its loss doesn't reduce terrorism all that much and (b) it seems that a little hard diplomacy could have stopped the payments. Hell, the payments should have been easy for Israel to intercept. He also talks about Saddam's defiance of sanctions, which is (a) somewhat iffy, and (b) again could have been dealt with a lot better than by conquering Iraq.

This statement is also starnge:

"Does anyone really believe, objectively, that Saddam, still in control, wouldn't just be marking time to wreak havoc against the West in general, and Israel in particular?"

Why should the animus against Israel in particular make Saddam particularly threatening? If he were arguing that it was right for Israel to take action against Iraq, this would make sense, arguing that we needed to take action because Israel in particular was threatened does not.

He also makes a big deal of the fact that Clinton called Saddam "a menace" and that Hitler teamed up with non-Aryans, so it is possible that Saddam could have teamed up with al Qaeda.

None of this shows that Saddam actually was teamed up with al Qaeda or that the removal of Saddam actually has reduced the terrorists' capacity to commit terrorism against us.

It seems that a lot of arguments for the war are more about "showing resolve" and about "taking the war to the jihadis" (i.e. invading the Middle East) than about actually articulating a strategy to reduce the number and capacity of the terrorists.

That is all.