>>>>"The Clinton administration commissioned studies to involve the use of the US military's ground forces...planning before and after the 1998 act of
legislation involved the use of US ground forces.">>>>
M. Gandall replied:
>>Undoubtedly such planning was undertaken. Contingency planning is a regular, congressionally mandated, requirement of US defence policy under all administrations. The Clinton administration also continued to develop
contingency plans for nuclear war, but there is as much evidence it was
actively preparing a massive ground assault on Iraq by US troops as there is
that it was actively preparing for a nuclear war - which is to say, none.>>
This isn't just contingency planning here. Gen. Downing was doing a special study and plan for the Clinton administration to see if 'regime change' for Iraq could effected without a multilateral invasion of the sort Poppy Bush cobbled together. Get it? The Clinton administration backed off when even CentCom was down on the idea (perhaps some of them know just how ineffective US 'elite' forces are for this sort of thing, these forces basically being light infantry with the US air force and naval air wings backing them up and lousy supply organization--while perhaps a few at CentCom also think about the geopolitical ramifications of letting Downing and Chalabi try to re-make 'Lawrence of Arabia').
Besides, I think you miss the much larger points here, so let me re-iterate:
1. Clinton was vetting Downing plans and other variations simply because he didn't want a multilateral military excursion;
2. Clinton's ongoing war against Iraq was far more than subversion--the bombing campaigns, the equipping of anti-Saddam militias, the deployment of special forces and CIA paramilitaries to Kurdish-controlled areas, all point to far more than subversion;
3. Finally, the paradox of 'multilateralism' or how Clinton broke it for good. If you constantly evoke 'multilateralism' to assert US hegemony, whatever it is you are doing, it isn't really multilateralism. Perhaps the simplistic histories will blame the loss of multilateralism on Bushboy, but the problems that developed between the US and EU over how the satellites should enable the US to run the world go back to Clinton and to the first Bush. More than anything, I think the unilateralism vs. multilateralism debate was just a show put on for the western media to show everyone how seriously Bush was weighing all options, when in fact, the decision to invade Iraq was made somewhere back in Texas in 1999-2000 when he was putting together the support to run for president. That the Democrats were already lining up to tell us how much they were for regime change (and Sen. Blubberman of CT being one of the pointmen on this, as well as Sen. Biden, the plagiarist), just goes to show, still yet once again, that they aren't a loyal opposition, but simply loyal.
F
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