Paul's Down-Home Page

Yesterday I got my author copies; today it’s Valentine’s Day, which means it’s also Julie‘s birthday! Mad props to you, birthday girl. For your birthday, I’ve invited Dick Cheney over to paint– I heard he was getting a little stressed out. (Well, not really; no one knows where he is, so I guess he didn’t get the invitation.)

Brandt said:

it’s apparent that the administration is trying to hide something in regard to Iraq. if “material breach” of U.N. Resolution #1441 is what the U.S. is striving for, then why were Blix and El Baradei not informed earlier of the U.S. Intellegence that was presented yesterday?

First off, you appear to have bought into the common misunderstanding of “material breach” (John and I already had a conversation about this.) That phrase has a specific meaning, and it’s not “Iraq gets caught holding banned weapons”. It means that Iraq is not complying with the resolution’s inspection requirements. (The exact language: Iraq is in breach if the UN “decides that false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq’s obligations and will be reported to the Council for assessment in accordance with paragraphs 11 and 12 below”). Blix and ElBaradei have both said that Iraq has not complied with the inspection regime. Voilà: material breach!
The pre- and post-Gulf War UN resolutions don’t just ban Iraq from having WMD, IRBMs, and so on. They ban them from attempting to obtain them. So, even if the Iraqis haven’t succeeded in building their al-Hussein derivative, guess what? Material breach again.
As for why we didn’t share our intel, well, you can’t have it both ways. If we reveal intelligence to the UN, we are essentially betting that they will protect the sources of that intelligence and the methods by which it was gathered. This is a dangerous bet, particularly in the case of people inside Iraq who are spying for us– it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what the Iraqis would probably do to anyone they suspected of leaking information to the US. Of course, as soon as the UN says “you’re in breach: we know you have $badThing at these coordinates”, the Iraqis move it, rendering us unable to strike it in the event of war. (I’m leaving aside the whole pre-inspection argument that the US and Britain were penetrating the inspection apparatus to gather intelligence– if those governments had such great intel, that argument must not have been true.)
Now, on to the argument about casualties: the reason for the buildup is a matter of two things, strategy and tactics. Both dictate assembly of an overwhelming force whenever possible: tactically for a massing of forces, and strategically as a deterrent or means of applying pressure.
Lastly, Brandt’s offhand suggestion that the evidence is manufactured is crazy. Take a look at a map, and you’ll see that Iraq has a significant number of different terrains, including some marshlands that aren’t all that different from south Louisiana (well, except for the Kurds…)