4 Secular Questions
A short and important op-ed from Safire today. Makes me think I'm not going insane.

On another note, last week both Newsweek and the New Yorker had pieces on Kurdistan. Two distinctly different pieces. Newsweek's was about hope, while the NYer was about Saddam's gassing of his own people. That we haven't been able to rally support for destoying such a monster boggles the mind and raises an important point about the leaders in the region. To me, the point is that they are deathly afraid of their own people. If that is the case, it means they cannot or do not communicate effectively with their own people. It raises the question of what is being communicated to the citizens of the diverse Arab countries. It would seem to be a message that is uniformly communicated throughout the region regardless of the different cultures contained there. The result of the message seems to be that it is better not to attack Saddam so as not to turn on a fellow Muslim than it is to support the United States. We are very familiar with this kind of thinking in the US and we should use that history to our advantage.

I think I think (to borrow from Peter King) the administration needs to tell the Arab leaders that peace in Israel is not a pre-requisite to deposing Saddam and to stop asking for that condition.

I think a war is coming in Kurdistan in the next ten years. A bad war during which we should align ourselves with the intersts of the people (and for that we need effective intelligence) not with our interests in oil. The Kurds will make a play for either independence or political dominance when Saddam falls, making his toppling that much trickier in the aftermath.
- posted by levinson @ 3/25/2002 07:46:00 AM