Intent
Following up on the excellent PBS series on this week, 'Avoiding Armageddon', we should concentrate more on intent rather than capability. The very nature of laboratories that could create biologic weapons make them all dual-use. Pay attention to what parties want to do, not so much what they can do. We'll never plug every hole. The discovery of Abu Abbas in Iraq is an interesting sign about Iraq harboring terrorists.
UN Money
The UN has not done much to administer Afghanistan. What indeed makes us believe that they are willing or able to do something different in Iraq. Prediction: The current allies will bear the brunt, and all the UN can and will do is spin world opinion one way or another.
I believe at some point, the US is going to share a good deal of intelligence information with the future imperial collaborators. This is going to fuel coordinated international police actions against identifyable terrorist orgs and cells. The amount of cooperation states give us in hunting down these criminals will determine whether or not we consider them 'rogue'.
It's probably not a fair way to approach diplomacy, but I think sooner or later every nation is going to have to choose if their displeasure with the US is worth the cost of having terrorists running loose.
Posted by: Cobb at April 16, 2003 07:06 PM
Re: Intent
I agree, we can never plug every hole and having weapons of mass destruction cannot be considered a threat in itself. But how do we define intent? That's the question. We also have to take into account the form of government that possess WMD...i.e. do they have institutional checks and balance to prevent abuse?
Posted by: mike van winkle at April 16, 2003 07:31 AM