Hugo

Maybe I'm missing something here. You're saying that President Bush is stupid, or certainly of no more than average intelligence, but you're also saying that he managed to rig the Florida election, fiddled with records to eliminate certain voters, cooked the recount books, and did this all under the very noses of the Supreme Court and all the investigative bodies in the US? He can't have been that dumb, then.

80 JSFs on a Nimitz will outgun 40 on a pair of light carriers. What you are talking about is either increasing vulnerability, decreasing firepower or increasing costs. It said that some do. "Some" can technically be two of them. Furthermore, all soldiers are required to be able to fire their weapons, but not necessarily well. Cooks and network administrators can shoot. Now, if you were to tell me that most SEALs or Green Berets prefer AK-47s, that's something, because spec ops have far better weapon handling skills, fire thousands of rounds a day in training and make it their business to know how to handle every gun made. Why? Because when it comes to testimony on aircraft performance I prefer that of a career fighter pilot to an amateur, civilian website author? All automatic weapons (don't call them guns, please) "jam" frequently. I know that Hollywood doesn't show you that, but it happens to be true. The barrel gets hot and can cook off, or gets fouled, a malformed round can fail to fire or the casing can jam in the ejection port, etc. The more rounds you fire and the faster you fire them, the greater the chance of a stoppage. The M16 is a better weapon than the AK-47. That is final, and you can't prove otherwise because it simply is not true. My point is that Apaches have given a very good account of themselves in combat, whereas Hinds generally get whipped.

Read the thread and find out!

Homosexuals are actually greatly over-represented in the ranks of pedophiles. We've been over this. I wouldn't compare heterosexuality to pedophilia, since pedophilia is a deviancy and heterosexuality isn't. If you read back through your previous posts you'll discover that you don't seem to know anything about this issue. As I pointed out before, you change your opinion with the tides.

In that case, then, Bill Clinton was in violation of international law for airstrikes in Iraq and completely unsanctioned involvement in Kosovo. OK, let me get this straight: People in America are homeless because they're on drugs or whatever, and that's the President's fault. People in Iraq are starving because Saddam refuses to fulfill conditions that would allow them to be fed, and this is not Saddam's fault. If Iraqis starved because of war that Saddam brought upon himself by invading a neighbouring country and refusing to leave peacefully when commanded to do so by the UN, or because Saddam refused to fulfill the conditions that would lift the trade embargoes, or because Saddam sold the drugs and food he did get to neighbouring countries for guns and tanks, then their deaths are the fault of Saddam as much as the ones that his minions directly tortured and executed. Historically, that's exactly when they would rise against you. Embargoes weren't the foundation of Saddam's power. If they were, how did he get along before the embargoes were in place? Easy: the same way he did afterward, by running a brutal police state. Why not China, who Clinton opted to sell supercomputers and missile technology to against the warnings of human rights groups and the advice of the NSA? You have to start somewhere, and George Bush picked Iraq because he believed it was the most pressing threat and certainly a good candidate for overthrow. Why not NK? Probably because it means war with China, and a diplomatic solution would be preferable. Why not Pakistan? President Musharraf has promised elections and reform, why not give him a chance before you start firing cruise missiles? For a leftist, you seem remarkably trigger-happy.

That was a great post, Derek. Let me just add some items, not lies per se, but nevertheless illustrations of the shining examples that the Democrats set: The Clinton administration holds the records for: - Most convictions and guilty pleas within the administration - Most Cabinet officials to come under criminal investigation - Most witnesses to flee country or refuse to testify - Most witnesses to die suddenly - Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions - Greatest amount of illegal campaign contributions from abroad Some additional facts: - Total cost of the Starr investigation (3/00) $52 million - Total cost of the Iran-Contra investigation: $48.5 million (Who wastes money?) - FBI files misappropriated by the White House: c. 900 - Estimated number of witnesses quoted in FBI files misappropriated by the White House: 18,000 - Number of witnesses who developed medical problems at critical points in Clinton scandals investigation (Tucker, Hale, both McDougals, Lindsey): 5 - Number of names placed in a White House secret database without the knowledge of those named: c. 200,000 - Number of persons involved with Clinton who have been beaten up: 2 - Number of women involved with Clinton who claim to have been physically threatened: 5 (Sally Perdue, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp, Elizabeth Ward Gracen) - Number of men involved in the Clinton scandals who have been beaten up or claimed to have been intimidated: 9 - Number of persons in the Clinton orbit who are alleged to have committed suicide: 7 - Number known to have been murdered: 2 - Number who died in plane crashes: 11 - Number who died in automobile accidents: 3 - Number killed during Waco massacre: 4 - Number of key witnesses who have died of heart attacks while in federal custody under questionable circumstances: 1 - Number of medications being taken by Jim McDougal at the time he was placed in solitary confinement shortly before his death: 12 - Number of unexplained deaths: 3 - Number of times Hillary Clinton said "I don't recall" or its equivalent in a statement to a House investigating committee: 50 - Number of paragraphs in this statement: 42 - Number of times Bill Clinton said "I don't recall" or its equivalent in the released portions of the his testimony on Paula Jones: 271 - Total number of facts or events not recalled before official bodies by Bill Kennedy, Harold Ickes, Ricki Seidman, Bruce Lindsey, Bill Burton, Mark Gearan, Mack McLarty, Neil Eggleston, John Podesta, Jennifer O'Connor, Dwight Holton, Patsy Thomasson, Jeff Eller, Beth Nolan, Cliff Sloan, Bernard Nussbaum, George Stephanopoulous, Roy Neel, Rahm Emanuel, Maggie Williams, David Tarbell, Susan Thomases, Webster Hubbell, Roger Altman, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton: 6,125 - Average occurrence of memory lapse by top administration figures while before official bodies: 235 - Amount of an alleged electronic transfer from the Arkansas Development Financial Authority to a bank in the Cayman Islands during 1980s: $50 million - Grand Cayman's population: 18,000 - Number of commercial banks: 570 - Number of bank regulators: 1 - Amount Arkansas state pension fund invested in high-risk repos in the mid-1980s in one purchase in April 1985: $52 million through the Worthen Bank. - Number of days thereafter that the state's brokerage firm went belly up: 3 - Amount Arkansas pension fund dropped overnight as a result: 15 percent - Percent of Worthen Bank that Mochtar Riady bought over the next four months to bail out the bank and the then-governor, Bill Clinton: 40 percent. - Percent of purchasers from the Clintons and McDougals of resort lots who lost the land because of the sleazy financing provisions: more than 50 percent - Democrat officeholders who have become Republicans since Clinton became president: 439 - Republican officeholders who have become Democrats since Clinton became president: 3 Not to mention: According to the New York Times, Clinton removed $2 billion in trade with China from national security scrutiny. Among the results: 77 supercomputers – capable of 13 billion calculations per second – that could scramble and unscramble secret data and design nuclear weapons. These were purchased by the Chinese without a peep stateside. At least some of them would be used by the Chinese military. With the transfer of the Panama Canal, four of Panama's ports ended up being controlled by a company partially owned by Hutchison-Whampoa Ltd., which in turn was owned by Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire so close to the Chinese power structure that he was offered the governorship of Hong Kong. President Clinton signed national security waivers to allow four U.S. commercial satellites to be launched in China, despite evidence that China was exporting nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, among other nations. One of these satellites belonged to Loral. Nine days later a Chinese Long March rocket carrying a $200 million satellite belonging to Loral failed in mid- flight. President Clinton approved a waiver allowing the launch of another satellite on board a Chinese rocket, despite a recommendation by the Department of Justice that the waiver would have a significant adverse impact on any prosecution arising from its pending investigation of Loral. Softwar newsletter reported that that some of the radios and cell phones being used by Chinese police in their campaign against dissidents were those sold to the Chinese by Motorola after Clinton overrode human rights objections by the State Department. From www.newsmax.com

First, if you cut back on escorts you make the whole thing more vulnerable, which was your beef in the first place. So let me get this straight: you will solve the problem of carriers being too vulnerable by making them more vulnerable? Secondly, HMS Illustrious carries 21 aircraft, most of them helicopters. USS Nimitz carries over 80 aircraft. Hence the fact that I said you'd need to build 4. That's 4 nuclear reactors, not 2, 4 hulls, not 1, 4 electronics suites, not 1, and so forth. That's going to work out much more expensive. These are amateur websites from people who've never flown any of the aircraft in question or seen them up close. I tell you that an F-16 pilot and a Major in the USAF, who has flown thousands of hours in an F-16 and has seen an SU-27 up close and watched it perform, would have no problem bringing an SU-27 down and this is your response? No, it said they were using AK-47s because there was a shortage of M16s. Read what you cite! Regardless, the AK-47 may be reliable but it's reliably inaccurate as well. Stopping power doesn't matter because it's inaccurate! Here's the basic rule to remember with guns: a bb-gun that hits does more damage than a 120mm smoothbore that misses! All the power in the world is useless if you can't put the round on target, and the AK-47 is lousy for that. The M16 is highly accurate, though, and the 5.56mm round is very cleverly designed to tumble which makes it actually do more damage than the 7.62mm round. Videogames don't have all the answers. Yeah, and as we saw in Afghanistan and Chechnya it can get killed by infantry at faster rates. Why would you need one? The Foxbat is based on an old and flawed philosophy of aircraft design. Not at all. If you're in a hardened structure (like an armoured warship) you could expect to survive a 500Kt blast as little as 2-3 miles away relatively intact. Nuclear bombs are not as incredible as laymen tend to think. For example, not even a massive 50Mt warhead from an SS-18 could expect to level all of New York. That's funny.

Do you notice a pattern here? Afghanistan sponsors terror. Afghanistan falls. Iraq sponsors terror. Iraq falls. I don't think that Saudi Arabia will be allowed to continue as it has, really. I apologise if George W Bush disappointed you by failing to take on the whole Middle East at once, but perhaps he's taking this one step at a time?

The RN can operate in any ocean, but only one! This is what I meant by not really a blue-water navy. It can deploy to another sea, but its range and forces are strictly limited. The US has at least one carrier battle group in each ocean, I believe, and in some spots, more. Those battle groups are really fleets in their own right. The RN does not have that, and since the demise of the Empire it no longer has a reason to do that either. The RN had better equipment and men than the Soviet Navy, but not the numbers, and in a naval conflict the RN would simply have been overwhelmed. The Soviet Navy might or might not have been able to undertake a Falklands-esque marine assault, but that was not what the Red Fleet was designed for. The USSR envisaged a land war in Europe, which the Navy would support by interdicting shipping routes between Europe and the USA. That's what the Soviet Navy was built for, anti-shipping, which is why they laid so much emphasis on submarines and not on aircraft carriers.

I don't believe Craig said that there were ties to 9-11, merely that there were ties to terror, and if you doubt that, perhaps you missed Saddam's public pledge of $8000 to the family of any suicide bomber that died attacking the USA or Israel?

Not in the same sense as the US Navy or even the former Soviet Navy. It does not have the numbers, the range or the firepower to maintain a sizeable overseas presence anywhere, and basically can operate as a task force or as homeland defence, but cannot conduct operations in more than one ocean anymore.

A lot of SDI projects actually use nuclear devices themselves. After all, if your enemy has just launched his ICBMs at you it becomes a zero-sum game anyway, and if a few nukes go off in your stratosphere that's better than a few hundred nukes going off in your cities. Anyway, to do that, you bring a small nuclear bomb within range of the MRVs and then detonate it. Those that aren't caught in the blast will have their guidance systems scrambled by the EMP. In that case, you are replacing one super-carrier with four small carriers and four supply ships. That's far more expensive than building one super-carrier, especially if you want them all nuclear-powered! No, it isn't. As I mentioned previously, I have a friend who flies an F-16 for a living, and Soviet warplanes are built to a WWII design philosophy and are unsuited to modern warfare. The SU-27 is a great plane from a WWII perspective, but compared to an F-15, F-16 or F-18 it's dead meat. It's inaccurate and has very high kickback due to the large 7.62mm round, which still doesn't do as much damage as the M16 does with a 5.56mm NATO round. Let's not even bother comparing it to the H&K G11, which is around 200% more accurate, carries almost 4 times the magazine capacity while weighing over a kilo less and has to be stripped and cleaned far less often. Essentially a blind bat. The electronics on the thing are unbelievably primitive and the thing is just damned unreliable. It does have heavy armour, which just basically means that an Apache will have to use a different weapon to kill it. I should think that the disastrous performance of the Hind in Afghanistan and Chechnya would clue you in about it's true worth. Then look at the Apache in both Gulf wars... which is the better helicopter, now? Still uses valves in its electronics, flies really fast and has a turn radius of about 10 miles. It still can't outrun a missile, and since it can't outturn one either, it's just another sitting duck. Not really. After all, many of those crew could be expected to survive a sinking (unless it was actually vaporised), and the Navy could put together another crew without too much trouble. Like I said, it would cost a few billion, but it could be taken out of the existing budget, even. Higher costs have been borne in war.

Not very good for national security, though, is it?

Yeah, put a 50Kt warhead on it. Bigger ships have far longer range, since you can put nuclear powerplants in ships that size, not to mention increased stores, fuel for aircraft, etc. The Royal Navy does have smaller carriers but it isn't really a blue-water navy anymore. I don't believe that for a second. The main asset of the Soviet military was fear of the unknown, since no layman really knew for sure what they were capable of. The truth is that most Soviet military hardware is complete crap, the balance being only mildly crap. This is the 'pride of Soviet industry.' You remove all incentive and make sure you have a huge technological lag, and everything you make will be crap, including military hardware. Add the incredible capacity of Soviet society to produce incompetent and badly motivated personnel at every turn, and you have a winning team! Now you know why the Warsaw Pact felt they had to outnumber NATO 5-to-1 to stand a chance of actually winning. How does it get to the general area and blow, when it's spoofed from the moment of launch, heads in the wrong direction and blows up some salmon 30 miles away? Sounds like a poor man's nuclear missile submarine to me. Only far more easy to detect, not nearly as accurate, with a far smaller warhead yield, etc. ICBMs are effectively useless in this day and age anyway - American missile systems are so well drilled from the Cold War that no nuclear power could pull a pre-emptive attack, and the retaliation would annihilate them. Not really. America lost four fleet-size carriers in WWII, plus one light carrier and six escort carriers. The cost to float a Nimitz-class carrier (biggest in the world) is around $4 billion, but the budget for the Navy in 2002 was around $99 billion. The budget for ship procurement is $9.3 billion, but if a carrier was lost I'm sure you could get Congress to grant the cost of replacement, even if you couldn't take it out of your yearly ship procurement budget.

I don't know if creating a Palestinian state would solve anything. The beef of the Arab nations and of the Palestinian groups is not that there is no Palestine, it's that there is an Israel, and I believe that the only way to satisfy them is to destroy Israel. That's no option, really, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and many more displaced and I think giving 5 million more Jews a choice between exile or death 50 years later is not terribly humane. The Jews built Israel by hard work. Of course, they had US aid, but so did South Vietnam, and look what happened to that: national character has to play a part and it's notable that Israel is the only democratic, free and really prosperous state in the entire region. Plus, of course, they were there first, before the Jordanians/Palestinians, before the British, they were there when Pharaohs still ruled Egypt. The best solution I can see is for the Arab world to accept the existence of Israel and Israel's right to exist and for the Palestinians to be accepted back into Jordan, their motherland. Of course, for other Arab nations to welcome Palestinians as citizens would be helpful, but since the Palestinians are actually Jordanian it would seem that the larger part of that burden must fall to them. Israel cannot take them in, even though it recognises Arabs as equals within its borders, for the demographic reasons I've outlined above. Fat chance, of course. Like Hitler, the Arab leaders have found that "blame the Jews" conveniently answers all the questions their people raise and to give that up would create the possibility that the real answer might come to light i.e. "We are a bunch of despotic and corrupt powermongers."

'Palestine', which never actually existed in its own right, was a part of Jordan, which has denied the Palestinians the right to settle and assimilate in their own country and insisted that they live in refugee camps - they have denied citizenship to their own citizens. The freedoms of Palestinians were not 'stolen', since Israel allows equality, and has 1.5m Arab citizens and even Arab MPs. The reason why Israel won't grant right of return is as follows: There are 1.5m Arabs in Israel and 5m Jews. Add 5m Palestinians to that mix, and you have 6.5m Arabs, and 5m Jews, and Israel ceases to exist and becomes yet another nutcase middle-eastern Arab state. To ask that Israel grant the Palestinians right of return is basically asking them to commit cultural suicide, and I think they had enough of that at Auschwitz, thank you very much!

Sure, Nova, but the culprits are not the US and other Western nations, they are over-industrialised dinosaurs like Russia and China. The USSR didn't give a damn about pollution (they built their nuclear subs without a scrap of reactor shielding, for heaven's sake), and neither did Mao, and now their descendants are inheriting that. That's why Kyoto is so useless - it targets the countries that aren't really posing a problem and ignores the ones that are.

If you are planning to lie in wait and then attack from the side or rear, that means you must first lie in wait ahead! When attacking surface ships, a sub can either give chase from the rear, approach from the side or lie in wait ahead. Since WWI, subs have always used the last tactic. Point-defence missiles will hit a target many miles out. Perhaps you've heard of the HOE project - a missile developed back in the 70s to shoot down nuclear warheads in re-entry? This was distinguishable by the large umbrella of vanes around it's nose, designed to increase chances of a hit, which actually proved unnecessary due to its very high accuracy. It is perfectly possible to shoot down a missile with another missile. If there was any real danger of what you are proposing, the admiral in charge of the carrier group would most likely anchor miles offshore and have oilers and supply ships come out to him from port. In the event of such a threat, those ships would be well guarded to prevent sabotage or unwanted backpack devices, and checked over by divers before departure. That's procedure anyway. In the Royal Navy, no ship or sub can leave port unless it's been thoroughly inspected by a diving team. No, they don't. You can't skim mere inches above the surface in a 12-foot sea unless your missile can swim! They fly at around 30-50 feet altitude which makes them not undetectable but certainly more difficult to detect due to backscatter, but they also have to 'pop-up' to 300-500 feet or so at regular intervals to re-acquire their target because the backscatter that interferes with enemy radar also interferes with their own sensors. At that point it's possible to get a fix and you can fire a point-defence missile or direct an escorting interceptor to the contact and have it acquire the incoming missile visually and shoot it down. Of course, this is assuming that the target is just sitting there like a dummy - Russian guidance systems are atrocious and would be easily spoofed or jammed by US systems. Visual/IR range is not that much at sea, so any missile has to home in by radar, and a target ship could spoof a decoy many miles away. Basically, the carrier group is really impervious to all but a highly co-ordinated and very determined missile attack from a large force of opposing ships and/or subs. It's not a simple fire-and-forget thing to attack a carrier group, what you are talking about is starting a naval battle and as Nelson said, battle plans never survive contact with the enemy. I'm sure you can come up with some remote scenario in which a carrier group is vulnerable - sabotage, or nuking the city it's berthed in, but regardless, the reason they are built is that the extremely slim risk of their loss is well worth their utility. They are not floating dead cans at all, but extremely potent warships with massive firepower, great flexibility and very long range. Does that answer your original question?

A good thing? I thought you were a moral relativist, in which case - good for whom? Probably a little from column A and a little from column B, but you would have to ask them since I don't know their own thoughts.

No, both do, at a range of 100-200 miles. So says Houston Jones, former commander of the Los Angeles-class boat USS Miami. They don't need to scout to the sides or rear, since any vessel at the side or rear moving fast enough to keep up would give itself away to every ship in the battle group anyway. 10 missiles would not be enough to saturate a carrier group's air defences. You would need three or four times that number to be assured of a hit - and 30-40 nuclear-tipped missiles are not going to come cheap. What terrorist groups have access to such funds? Don't forget, too, that these have to be launched in salvoes. Warships fire missiles individually. Of course, once the first missile is fired, the launching ship instantly distinguishes herself from other shipping traffic and will not get to fire a second missile. If you have 5 ships, don't count on getting more than 5 missiles loose - not enough to overcome the air defences and you still have achieved nothing. Your second scenario is more plausible, except that most protestors don't want to die for their cause. Greenpeace has never been able to round up 50 boats so I don't suppose terrorists would have any better luck. Even if they did, escorting vessels would just form a cordon sanitaire and any boat violating that would get shelled, quite simply. I doubt you would get any diver close enough.

You made the contention, so the burden of proof is upon you. Israel has, since its inception, remained the most stable state in the Middle East and has had a constant democratic government. If a coalition government comes apart, and new elections have to be held, I wouldn't call that a country "tearing itself apart." But you keep kidding yourself that what you say is new and interesting. The fact is that everything you say has been said before, and in a better way. There are leftists on this board whom I respect, but you are not one of them, since your debating skills are very lacking, your viewpoints are extremely unoriginal and you back them up with very shaky evidence, or more usually, none at all. You've only shown us that you've read two books, and you don't show that you even understood them. You need to examine more evidence from both sides of each argument, and more importantly, you do have some maturing to do. 17-year-olds often believe that they know everything, but as the years go past they usually realise that they knew nothing. It's all very well to wax lyrical on socialist principles when you are a student or welfare claimant on the receiving end, but when you are working, trying to support a family and watching thousands of your tax dollars being wasted on socialist boondoggles things look a little different.

In order to get in firing position, the launching sub has to wait ahead of the group. This assumes that you know their course. You can't chase or run alongside, since the group moves so fast that you would give yourself away with acoustic noise. A sub moving faster than 15 knots may as well hang a sign reading "depth-charge me" from its periscope. First, such a sub has to evade interception by the two nuclear attack subs that scout far ahead of each carrier group. These boats use sprint-and-drift methods and their crews and equipment are very, very good. I wouldn't think there is much chance of an Oscar sub evading them, but if they do: First come the ASW frigates, with ASW helicopters and maritime aircraft. These aircraft can sweep a few hundred nautical miles in a very small period of time, and cannot be attacked by their victim sub but can easily detect it with dunking sonobuoys. Once the sub is found, all they have to do is drop an aerial-launched torpedo, which they will do right over the sub's position, giving the enemy sub about a minute to react else 600lbs of high explosive hits the sub's hull and cracks it open. Assuming they evade detection by aircraft, there are of course the ASW frigates and cruisers, with very advanced sonar, depth charges, and ASROC missiles that fly out to the sub's position and then drop a torpedo in the water mere meters from the target, again, about a minute for the enemy to react. While the missiles have long range, the sensors of the launching subs do not. In order to get a decent firing solution they would have to move in very close, vastly increasing their chances of detection. It can be done from much farther away if you have a spotter aircraft, but what chance does a spotter aircraft have against a full complement of maritime fighters and strike aircraft? That's right - none. Assuming they got past the escorts, closed to sensor range and actually managed to launch a missile, that missile would need to get past SAM missiles and the phalanx close-in-gun system. Those defences are very advanced, and the only chance you stand is saturation - which means you'd need about 3 Mongos (as the Oscars are nicknamed) to launch at least 36 missiles to stand a slim chance of penetrating the missile defences. Of course, each Oscar you send is worth several billion dollars, and the chances are certain that none of them will return from the mission. Even if, by some miracle, they manage even get close enough to launch any missiles, that will instantly give away their position and they would be sunk within a minute. You might think that's a good trade, were it not for the fact that the chances are slim to none that they will accomplish their mission before they are sunk. For all the good it would do, you might as well scuttle the damn subs and save the crews. You could put it on a non-combatant vessel, of course. Assuming the escorting ships don't warn it off or sink it for failing to vacate the area, it would still have to launch about 30 missiles to stand a chance of one getting through. You can't make a non-combatant vessel launch 30 missiles without it looking like it can launch 30 missiles, which is an open invitation to be sunk by maritime aircraft whilst well outside of missile range. This is why I say that you don't know what you are talking about. Of course, you are a 17-year-old with absolutely no military knowledge, but to expect that you know more of naval matters than Pentagon planners and naval officers of all ranks is just an invitation to be told: You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Is "nova satori" Latin for "idiotic sweeping statements made without a shred of justification?" It should be. If you can't at least put up an argument, don't bother shooting your mouth off, because somebody will make you look foolish (again).

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Then your definition is wrong. The chemical weapons I described would be illegal under the Geneva Convention, and the UN itself includes chemical and biological weapons as WMD. Doesn't matter. It's still against the Geneva Convention and the UN would define such chemicals as WMD if their inspectors found them. Because he was facing certain military defeat whether he used WMD or not. To use WMD might have very briefly slowed the Coalition advance, but that's all. Saddam's only hope was playing the victim card and hoping that there were enough saps like you in the international community to force a Coalition withdrawal, and the minute he used WMD he would have thrown that card out of the window and rendered his situation utterly hopeless. It didn't seem to adversely affect his regime before the sanctions, now, did it? As the Coalition did in both Gulf Wars?