September 02, 2002

Must Read: You simply have to see this email that my D/FW blogging gal pal Rachel Lucas received from a source that wishes to remain anonymous; this may be the REAL 4-1-1 on our War with Saddam's Iraq!

"There's someone out there that I have to thank.
I don't know who, and I can't even be sure he exists, but I think he saved a lot of lives.

I'm a manager at a large American manufacturing company. We make a lot of the hardware that goes overseas to break things and kill people, and in recent years we've gotten pretty good at it. I'm not an Executive Vice President, half of Olympus and the Pantheon is still above me, but I love what I do and they think I do it well enough to pay me every week. If you read Dilbert, I'm at the level of the pointy haired boss.
You may not have known it, but a couple of months ago America went to war with Iraq.
It didn't make the news because we weren't breaking things and killing people yet. But we were getting ready to. I don't mean there were people on the pundit shows saying Saddam was a threat that we needed to address. I mean we went there. Around the middle of June a frigging huge amount of hardware started shipping overseas on very short notice. So short that they didn't really care how much it cost to get there, and they didn't care if all the maintenance hadn't been done, they wanted it there and they wanted it NOW. A bunch of it is stuff my company makes so I try to keep track of where it is.

At about the same time the rhetoric started getting heavier. We started getting statements that things would happen sooner rather than later. That Saddam was within (fill in the blank) months of having an operational atomic bomb.
Suddenly, last week, it all changed. The rhetoric calmed down. There was more from within the administration about how we should have one last try at weapons inspection, and that GWB would be making the case to Congress and the American People before a war started. And some of the equipment started coming back. Not much, maybe 10%, mostly the stuff that could be used at home, that needed more maintenance, that shouldn't have been sent over in the first place. There's still a huge amount of equipment over there, 10 times more than the average newspaper reading member of the public would assume, and it still has a lot of personnel to support it, but it's not nearly as urgent as it was a month ago.
Now I see two possibilities. The first is that the administration, in the person of GWB, just changed his mind.That he woke up one day in June and thought "Hey! Let's blow Saddam off the face of the earth! That'll be good!" But then when everything was just about ready, he was out clearing some brush and thought,"Damn it's hot. We should attack Iraq when it's cooler..."
If you think George W. is a complete idiot that scenario probably makes sense. But I think GWB is the living rope-a-dope. You don't fly an F-102 and graduate from Harvard Business School if you're a complete idiot. In fact, usually people who do that are pretty damned bright. Bright enough that they like people to underestimate them. I think GWB cultivates the "Simple country boy that don't talk right" image on purpose.
So... I think there was a threat. It was serious and immediate enough for us to rush into battle. I think the estimates of Saddam getting a bomb within 2 years were right. Maybe it was within a couple of months. And, maybe, now it's not.
There's been a lot of stuff going on in Iraq over the last month, too. The major media has picked up some of it. We keep bombing stuff. We say it's anti aircraft facilities. They say it's factories. And there's probably a lot of things happening with very skilled people on the ground that we don't even get the slightest hint about. So the point of all this is to express my gratitude. To someone that may not even exist, that put their life on the line and removed the urgency from our going to war. We'll still do it, when we're ready, but we don't have to do it right now. So on behalf of the people that will sleep in warm beds tonight. And on behalf of their sons and daughters who'll be working here and getting Dominos delivered while they turn that bolt, and not at an airfield in the middle of the desert half a world away... Thank you.(signed)The curly haired but balding boss."

I think this "balding boss" guy has come up with a very credible scenario and this "matches" the Middle East buzz from places like DebkaFile.
Rachel, what a great post! Kudos, girlfriend.