{"id":2907,"date":"2002-09-23T17:48:05","date_gmt":"2002-09-23T17:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=305"},"modified":"2002-09-23T17:48:05","modified_gmt":"2002-09-23T17:48:05","slug":"iraq-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2907","title":{"rendered":"IRAQ"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u0092m working semi-diligently on the \u0091combatants\u0092 post, but haven\u0092t got it to come out right yet (i.e. I\u0092m not impressed by the arguments I\u0092m making, and yet haven\u0092t revealed interesting enough gaps in them); so was browsing around and just read the Patio Pundit\u0092s take<\/a> on why we should invade Iraq.
\nRather than get into a point-by-point discussion (I don\u0092t disagree, I don\u0092t completely agree, I\u0092m kind of tilting slowly over the fence toward \u0091do it\u0092), I thought I\u0092d present a thought experiment.
\nTake a live cat, and put it in a sealed box\u0085no, wrong experiment<\/i>.
\nTry this one instead<\/b>.<\/p>\n

One nice afternoon, I\u0092m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break.
\nThe power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don\u0092t work. My backup AM\/SW\/SSB radio in the garage doesn\u0092t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud.
\nWe\u0092ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small\u00855KT\u0085nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle.
\nWe\u0092ll skip over the hundred thousand or so who have just died or will die at each site in the coming week, from burns and radiation poisoning, or from one of the diseases or a lack of medical attention caused by the collapse of the public health system.
\nMy family and I are not in immediate danger, because I\u0092m maybe 10 miles from the blast center, and shielded by the mass of Palos Verdes hill, and the prevailing winds are onshore, meaning they blow the radioactive dust inland and away from me, but the next few days are pretty chaotic.
\nThey\u0092ve declared martial law, and imposed strict limits of transportation, because about half the refinery capacity for Southern California is destroyed or offline; the dark clouds from the burning tank farms and the smell of burning oil still fill the air. But I\u0092m upwind, so it isn\u0092t too bad. The shortage of distillates like gasoline and jet fuel will last a while, because even though the offline refineries only represent maybe 5 \u0096 10% of the national refining capacity, the emergency uses have taken priority.
\nThe economy is at a halt, both because of the martial law and because three of the five national shipping centers have been devastated and contaminated beyond immediate use, meaning that Los Angeles\/Long Beach Harbor and Seattle harbor on the West Coast are out of commission, as is the Port of New York on the East. They aren\u0092t letting container ships into San Francisco Bay yet, and probably won\u0092t for a few weeks. NEST is setting up a scanning system on helicopters and positioned on the Golden Gate Bridge, but emergency and military supplies will get precedence, so many of the ships simply turn around and head back to Japan and Hong Kong.
\nMeanwhile, politics have gotten a little complicated.
\nThere is a lot of saber-rattling going on, and everyone in national office is pretty much ready to sign any declarations of war the president asks for; he gets broad emergency powers, and habeas corpus is suspended, along with a number of other rights as large parts of the country are placed under military control.
\nInternationally, everyone is lining up to send aid, and the Arab countries are falling over themselves to send monetary aid and to deny any role in this.
\nThe ships themselves were from Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, and the origins of each container on the ships is being investigated, along with the detritus of the bombs themselves.
\nSaddam Hussein swears on his mother\u0092s life that he had nothing to do with it.
\nThe President needs the resources of the military at home, to manage the martial-law driven economy, and the new demands for autarkic security, so we begin to withdraw troops from Europe, Korea, and the Middle East, trying to degrade the readiness of each area as little as we can.
\nThere is some evidence that one of the weapons was a Russian tactical nuke, in a batch that was thought to have been in Georgia, and that Chechen militants were suspected of having access to it; they suddenly have a national treasury that is $100,000,000 richer, and it looks like some of the funds came from madrassas<\/s> hawalas (thanks, William)<\/i>, the Middle Eastern \u0091cash\u0092 banking community.
\nOne of the weapons appears to have been homemade, and we can\u0092t figure out where the other one came from.
\nThe pressure is on the president to do something.
\nThe U.N. issues statements deploring the \u0091tragedy\u0092 and supporting direct action against the perpetrators, as soon and sufficient evidence is found to identify who they were.
\nWe find that some of the funds which might<\/u> have paid for one of the weapons might<\/u> have been paid by a Jordanian oil trader who is thought to sometimes act as a front for the Iraqi government. We\u0092ve turned a blind eye to him in the past, because the funds that went back were partially used for humanitarian purposes, and because he gave some of our intelligence assets entr\u00e9e to the Iraqi underground.
\nHussein goes on CNN and Al-Jazeera, and states that a conspiracy among his senior officers was responsible for \u0091this humanitarian tragedy\u0092 and publicly executes them and their families on live television.
\nHe offers to open the country to inspections by a joint French\/Swiss\/German inspection team, and to pay $1,000,000,000 in reparations to the U.S. once the oil embargo is lifted.
\nThe UK offers troops to assist with \u0091humanitarian aid\u0092 in the U.S.
\nThere are fistfights in the Capitol, as the question of how to respond to this splits the House and Senate.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Got the picture??
\nSo here are some questions for all parties.
\nFor the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody\u0085anybody\u0085who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?
\nFor the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won\u0092t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?
\nSee, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I personally don\u0092t believe would be all that hard to pull off).
\nOne is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.
\nThe other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.
\nAs you can imagine, I see problems with both.
\nWhat do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?
\n[10\/2\/02: followup discussion is here<\/a>]<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u0092m working semi-diligently on the \u0091combatants\u0092 post, but haven\u0092t got it to come out right yet (i.e. I\u0092m not impressed by the arguments I\u0092m making, and yet haven\u0092t revealed interesting enough gaps in them); so was browsing around and just read the Patio Pundit\u0092s take on why we should invade Iraq. Rather than get into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}