I wanted to say something about this in the course of a thread "The Evidence Is In," but really it's a bit of a side issue so I figured I'd open a new thread for it.
I came down kind of hard on sirs for his reasoning that Saddam would have turned over nukes or other WMD to terrorists "because he's a gambler." I don't want to make it personal to sirs, he provided the example of simplistic reasoning but probably half of America subscribes to it, or more accurately is misled by it, and I feel kind of bad because I might have been excessively harsh in my response.
We're probably all guilty of simplistic reasoning at some point, but at its most dangerous form, it's deliberately used by militarists and neo-colonialists to whip up a fear, a paranoia, about the intentions of others by use of stereotypes, not necessarily racial or ethnic, but character stereotypes: he's a madman, so he can do this; he's a gambler, so he would have done that. And a lot of poor dumb schmucks buy into it because they don't bother to use the basic logical testing processes that they were born with.
First of all, everybody's a gambler to some extent, or a bit of a madman (say "irrational" if "madman" is too much to swallow) so these characterizations are not always useful. But more typically, somebody will read a book review or an article about, say, Hitler or Napoleon, where some form of the comment "reckless gamble" or "inveterate gambler" is made. It's an apt description for somebody who bets the farm on a certain policy or offensive, often in circumstances of extreme desperation with few other alternatives open. In Hitler's case, gambling or reckless risk-taking, was a hall-mark of his career from his rise to power to his early years in office to his attack on Russia and finally the Battle of the Bulge. But a careful examination of each of the episodes shows that while risk was common to all of them, the circumstances were widely different. In his earliest gambles (the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, for example,) Hitler risked his own life and his comrades', but as they were all front-line combat veterans, the risk was not one that was completely foreign to them, they must have calculated the odds and as long as they weren't suicidal, decided to take the chance. In Hitler's early days of political power, the risks that he took in reversing the strictures of the Treaty of Versailles were basically that he would be forcefully rebuffed, not that he would bring total disaster on the entire nation. Attacking Russia before he had finished off Great Britain seemed like a deadly gamble, but by this point Hitler was playing against time - - the inevitable entry of the U.S.A. into the conflict, which would have left him with a two-front war in any event; it seemed better to start the conflict while Russia was still arming itself, when he had the chance of delivering a knock-out punch. And the Battle of the Bulge, which was a gamble born of sheer desperation, when the Allied armies were closing in on him from all directions.
So although it's loosely correct to call Hitler a gambler, the word is meaningless. He took calculated risks, and usually when he was running out of alternatives or had little to lose.
To call Saddam a gambler is, in the first instance, just not true. A gambler would have invaded Kuwait without first consulting the U.S. Would have initiated the Iran war without tying down any help from the U.S. Would have confronted the U.S. militarily in Kuwait. Saddam did none of these. He made some bad decisions, and in each case, the stakes were relatively tolerable - - military defeat.
In none of their "gambles" did Hitler or Saddam face any serious risk of total nuclear anihilation, which is the risk that Saddam would have faced had he given WMD to terrorists who then used them on the US. Usually even "gamblers" who make lots of crazy bets would pass this one up. If they took the bet, it would only be because it promised some enormous benefit. What possible benefit could Saddam derive from such a gamble? That two or three cities in the US would be taken out, leaving the rest of the infidel giant unharmed and enraged? THAT'S the gamble he would have taken? Two or three American cities in return for ALL of Iraq and all of its people, Saddam and his loved ones included?
To merely state the stakes is to reveal the absurdity of the argument. But people buy it. Why? Saddam "is a gambler." Period. End of story. All gamblers are equally insane and all will court nuclear anihilation for trivial benefits. Happens every day. Not. Well, try madman. Saddam is a "madman." And a gambler.
The problem is, in order for Bush to be justified, Saddam has to be some kind of threat. Saddam ISN'T a threat to the U.S.A. Couldn't be a threat to the U.S.A. He represented a nation of about 23 million, the U.S. 300 million of the most heavily armed people on the face of the earth, with unlimited nukes. The concept is ludicrous. But it has to be created and sold. And that's where those labels come in - - "madman;" "gambler." It's as if, for some people, all rational thinking stops once the label appears. That was my basic beef. And I'm sorry if I appeared to be a little testy in stating it.
