pretzel logic (This should really be tagged NP, shouldn't it?)

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy
--- lorentzen-nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
and if saddam really is so
> stupid to 
>  attack israel, sharon, as he confirmed recently more than once, will
> drop  
>  nuclear bombs on bagdad immediately.

Apparently Diner almost makes an interesting point here. Does Iraq have
a "legitimate" fear of some sort of nuclear first strike by Israel in
the next big Arab-Israeli war? Does President Hussein (It seems
dismissive and disrespectful to call a world leader by his first name
when one is discussing policy, so I don't like to use "Saddam". Do we
refer to Putin as "Vladi", or Chirac as "Jack"? We called Nixon "Dick"
but that wasn't a monicker so much as a descriptive prefix. To call
Hussein Saddam is a childish rhetorical tactic.) Does loathsome
President Hussein want nukes to deter Israel and the US and give
himself more room to maneuver in a classic political sense? An Iraqi
nuclear weapon would be an effective, immediate and mortal military
threat to Israel, as they recognized in 1981. The threat to me
personally as a New Yorker would be from a nuclear weapon delivered by
third party as an act of revenge. And despite my best efforts to avoid
dwelling on(hopefully) improbable possibilities, I do feel personally
threatened --- I hope that it won't hurt much...

Thought experiment: Would Hitler in his bunker have set off his sole
nuclear warhead over London before shooting himself? I believe it is an
absolute certainty that he would have done so. Don't you?

But there I go again --- demonizing Saddam with casual and simplistic
references to Adolf Hitler. I'll get back to demonizing Bush Jr. later
this morning. I do it reflexively and often.

Mark

--- lorentzen-nicklaus <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de> wrote:
and if saddam really is so
> stupid to 
>  attack israel, sharon, as he confirmed recently more than once, will
> drop  
>  nuclear bombs on bagdad immediately.


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