Originally posted by Warlock
Gee ... no wide spread panic here eh ? No offense to anyone here ,.. so if the following upsets anyone ... oh well,....
Yeah, because it's one thing to issue terror warnings every day, say that anybody near a nuclear power plant, public building, large city or the ground is putting themselves at imminent risk of terrorist attack, and scream about a bioweapon threat when powdered donuts turn out to leave dust and mosquitoes bite people, never mind encouraging people to spy on their neighbors because they MAY BE TERRORISTS. Saying that the government had any evidence that Saddam has the weapons it's been claiming it knows he has all along is the WRONG kind of panic-inducing!
Screw your head on, kid. It's a war, and we've got war propoganda. A heightened state of panic, tempered with murderous hatred, is just what the powers that be want and need. Never mind that producing actual, real evidence, instead of making it up, wouldn't create a very effective panic. Maybe one or two new bomb shelters, but people are running on the assumption that he's got bombs anyway, because that's what the military keeps screaming to panic about on TV.
But I think the Joint Chiefs have been doing all this for a wee but longer than ANYone on this forum. Hell most of them have prolly held that position longer than half the forum's been breathing.
Let the ppl TRAINED to make this type of call do it.
And I'm sure Stalin was quite qualified for the job, as well. In fact, no junta dictator comes to mind who wasn't, in some way. "years of experience" might wash at McDonalds, but not when I have to live with deeper consequences than food poisoning. Assuming that, simply because someone appears to know what they're doing, they're any more likely to get it right than Joe Blow might sound good on paper, but in real life it's almost never been the case in politics- certainly not the case when you're talking about US foreign relations. Pull out a history book and tell me how well the qualified men have fared in the past.