Your right. I equate these clerics with feudal war lords. Each with a
private army and each trying to consolidate power.

"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...

"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
In a previous article, "C J Campbell"
said:
is that poor intelligence is becoming very costly. Satellites are
predictable and are unable to loiter over an area, while drones can
cover
only relatively small areas. From Desert Shield up to now we have been
basically blind in our search for WMDs, terrorist and troop
concentrations,
mobile Scuds, etc.

I think Predators and Global Hawks would do a better job on almost all
of
those jobs.

But what the US really needs is spies on the ground. The biggest
problem
in the lead-up to Iraq is that they put too much emphasis on the tales
of
one guy, who lied through his teeth trying to get the US to depose
Saddam
so he could take over.

Maybe he did do that, but Saddam's actions in the period leading up to the
war seem to indicate that Saddam himself believed he had weapons of mass
destruction. He may have been deceived by his own people. Certainly there
is
a very lawless element in Iraqi culture. Every two-bit cleric seems
willing
to submit to no law but his own, and every one of them seems willing to
back
up his threats with force. They out-gun both the Iraqi military and the
police. It is as if we allowed Jesse Jackson or Jerry Fallwell to maintain
their own private armies while declaring the holy cities of New York and
Birmingham off-limits to law enforcement personnel. To paraphrase the
quote
attributed to T.E. Lawrence: "So long as the Islamic nations submit to no
law but that of local clerics, they will remain a little people, a silly
people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel."