Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 14:12:01 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>,
    "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
From: "Barry L. Newton" <bnewton at ashcomp.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Re: Re: Re: Getting mooned ?
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

At 12:30 PM 2/3/2004, Strong, Lee wrote:
>         Barry fondly remembers ice skating down the frozen Martian canals.
>I think there's a difference between Heinlein's Red Planet and Fox's
>Yarth/Terra.  Heinlein was extrapolating from shaky but still credible
>science at the time he woke his novel of human-alien understanding.

Point taken.  And I do indeed remember that story fondly.

>Fox was
>just forgetting to keep things consistent from chapter to chapter.

Perhaps he was on deadline and just intercut chapters from two different
manuscripts?[joke]  [Actually, "deadline" might very well have kept him
from tidying up.]  Did this moon discrepancy occur multiple times?

>         If you would like to debate the WMD issue, read **all** of inspector
>David Kay's comments first.  The _Wall Street Journal_ has published a
>number of good articles on the subject recently.

The WMD dig was just too good to resist.  Actually, I've heard Dr. Kay live
(at NIST last year, when he was as sure as everyone else that Saddam must
be hiding *something*), on C-SPAN addressing Congress, and read his recent
column in the Washington Post.  It's perfectly reasonable to me that
intelligence services with negligible human assets on site could be fooled
by a government which *wanted us to believe that those weapons existed.*

The intermediate step I (and a number of unhappy allied nations) wanted to
see was where we would have told Saddam:  "We're sending in 5000 inspectors
and 150 helicopters to help them make unnanounced inspections. Along with
10,000 troops with heavy weapon support to ensure their security. Any
interference with them will be regarded as an act of war."  If he balked at
that, we would have been in a far stronger moral position to launch an
attack.  We might even have been able to put together a coalition, with UN
support, overflight permissions, and assorted other benefits.

Barry