Good Questions
Regnery, Alfred S.
I N THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR'S TRADITION of presenting all sides of the conservative cause, we include herein at least one piece which will provoke some of our readers and supporters to inquire of our...
...Halper and Mr...
...To add to the irony, Saddam paid for his weapons with money acquired from us and our allies for a product—oil—that happened to be in vast supply under his homeland...
...If Ronald Reagan had been elected twenty years later, and if all other factors were unchanged, would we have gone to war in Iraq...
...Doing so, we believe, adds to the vigor and strength of the debate and, best of all, provokes our readers into thoughtful controversy...
...A good question, and one that is probably unanswerable...
...We pride ourselves on adhering to no single niche of the conservative philosophy, but instead on putting forth arguments covering many veins of the movement...
...On another front, Iraq had one of the largest inventories of weapons in the world, and it is probably the only arsenal in history that was entirely purchased from elsewhere (which means from Russia, China, France, Germany, and several dozen other of our allies...
...Alternatively, one has to wonder why, after building an arsenal of every kind of weapon he could lay his hands on, he would not have included atomic, biological, and chemical weapons to his stockpile...
...Another good question...
...I N THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR'S TRADITION of presenting all sides of the conservative cause, we include herein at least one piece which will provoke some of our readers and supporters to inquire of our motives...
...But we present a formidable argument, written by two highly astute observers of, and participants in, the Washington scene who think we would not have...
...Rumsfeld went on to say that rebuilding Iraq into a democracy was no different from what the United States did after World War II through the Marshall Plan, and said he thus suspected that Ronald Reagan would have done exactly the same thing in Iraq that we are doing now...
...The Spectator's ace reporter Shawn Macomber has uncovered the story in no small detail, and one wonders, upon learning of the extent of his conventional arsenal, why Saddam needed weapons of mass destruction in the first place...
...The neoconservatives claim to hold Ronald Reagan's foreign policy legacy, but Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke take strong exception to that notion, providing considerable argument that the Reagan concept of warfare was far less adventuresome than that advanced by the neoconservatives...
...Although the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq continues, and will, no doubt, until the November election, the great untold (until now) story involves not weapons of mass destruction, but rather Saddam's conventional weapons...
...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is not a neoconservative, but who has several on his staff, believes that Ronald Reagan's legacy is present in Iraq, and in a speech last fall at the Reagan Library in California made the point that 19 of the 32 countries with military forces in Iraq are nations that Ronald Reagan helped to make free, and equated our efforts to free the Iraqi people with Reagan's successful campaign to add World Communism to the ash heap of history...
...Clarke respectfully disagree...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
