4A • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
OPINION
FRIDAY, MARCH 14,2003
Free for All
Call 864-0500
Free for All callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. Kansan editors reserve the right to omit comments. Slanderous and obscene statements will not be printed. Phone numbers of all incoming calls are recorded.
For more comments, go to www.kansan.com
All I want is for my stupid ex-sorority to quit asking me for money.
A quote from Ross: "KU is a dry campus No spilling allowed."
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Doesn't anyone in this city know how a four-way stop works?
You don't realize how greek KU is until you walk through the GSP parking lot and see all of the SUVs with the Kappa stickers on them and then look up at the windows and see all the KUnited posters in them.
Why is it that chocolate always tastes better in the shape of an egg? I love Easter.
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Any fool knows what a soldier does. He takes orders from politicians and kills people.
the world?
Hmm, a front page article over the possible loss of jarred frogs as a result of war with Iraq? How about soldiers' lives?
the world?
To the person who's gonna videetape themselves having sex, can I be your partner? Shh.
--the world?
For spring break, Lawrence, here I come!
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I just made a life-altering realization. All the hot chicks on the TV shows I watched growing up were named Kelly: Kelly Kapowski, Kelly Bund, and Kelly what's-her-name from 90210.
So, we just made it through the first thunderstorm with my dog. Our apartment is all wet now, and it's not just from the leak in our roof.
Only my blonde roommate would be amazed that her cell phone still works when the power goes out.
Dukakis should have won.
Those classified personnel who refuse to listen to reason are as bad as the French,who refuse to support the war against Iraq.
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I'm in a fraternity and I'd just like to say, it truly is just an overglorified treehouse club full of Young Republicans.
I think it would suck to be an actor for the genital herpes commercials.
To the Isaac Newton sex guy in the Free for All, first of all, you stole that joke from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show years ago, and second of all, the scientific figurehead for evolution would be Darwin, not Isaac Newton.
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I just saw one of those people who walks backwards and takes the prospective students around campus, and they were reading the Free for All out loud to them. I haven't decided if that's a good idea or not.
--the world?
So it turns out that the whole selling-
your-roommate-on-Ebay thing is a bad
idea. I thought maybe if I started out at
$1.50 I'd get some bids, but people are
telling me that I should pay them to take
her away.
Congratulations Heather, you will absolutely be a beautiful bride.
the world?
Did the Kansan seriously just print an editorial that said women are naturally less ambitious than men? Come on.
Bill O'Reilly is an idiot.
To the ladies of Pi Beta Phi, this is the Pi Kaps. We're having extra Rock Chalk practice over at the house tonight, so please come over. We miss you and love you.
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RERUNS OF OUR LIVES
Neil Mulka and Emily Elmore for The University Daily Kansan
PERSPECTIVE
Means of looming war meets no ends
We're only a few days away from war now. Is it a war that will end a serious threat to us and the world?
COMMENTARY
No. It will be one that will likely do more harm than good.
Those opposing war have no sympathy for Saddam Hussein. He is known to have used chemical and biological weapons and, for that, deserves to be dethroned. Rather, we are concerned about the deaths this action will cause.
Americans tend to have faith in smart bomb technology to surgically remove threatening structures and leave nearby buildings unharmed. But numerous examples of failures can be found in the past few years. During the NATO bombing campaign in former Yugoslavia, in early May 1999, a cluster bomb aimed for an airfield hit a hospital and killed 10 in the city of Nis. To be fair, this was not a smart weapon. But how much life was lost in this town because of the loss of a hospital cannot be known.
Sam Lane
opinion@kansan.com
Even if the bomb is flawless, it can
only be as good as the intelligence on the target. This point was hammered home on May 7, 1999, in Belgrade, the same time as the Nis fiasco. A B-2 launched three satellite-guided bombs, the latest smart weapons, which use global-positioning systems to find their targets in 3-D space. Two of the three bombs scored direct hits on what they thought — because of a CIA blunder — was the Serbian Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement. It was actually the Chinese Embassy.
This is especially relevant in Iraq because Hussein has weapons of mass
destruction. We know he has anthrax, for example, because Uncle Sam sent him some from a lab in Maryland back when the United States was more worried about Iran. And any bomb, no matter how smart, that detonates over an armory with a hundred pounds of anthrax spores will only spread a hundred pounds of anthrax spores to the wind.
The difficulty of identifying targets in Iraq is further compounded by Hussein's intermingled civil and military facilities. Bombing and other destructive acts cannot avoid civilian damage, and military intervention exposes our troops to the possibility of being hit with these weapons.
The chaos of war introduces the possibility that such facilities could get lost in the confusion. To ferret them out, we need tough, thorough U.N. inspections with military backing. Inspections cannot be effective in the heart of a war zone. Hussein cannot use unconventional weapons against inspectors in a city, an Iraqi city, the way he can against troops
on a battlefield.
Sending troops to Iraq is the only way Hussein can seriously harm our country. It is true he has chemical and biological weapons and is probably close to having nuclear weapons. But he has no delivery mechanisms to hit a country half a world away. The Al Samoud missile, capable of hitting targets as far away as Israel, is the edge of his attack range and has no chance of hitting the United States. Even he can't be insane enough to smuggle such weapons into this country using suicide bombers because the United States could nuke his whole country. But the threat of war looming over his shoulder could push Hussein to do something desperate he otherwise would have sense enough to avoid.
If dethroning Hussein was our intent, we would have done so in the Gulf War. We cannot guarantee his successor to be any more U.S.-friendly. In any case, war is not the best means to any of our ends.
PERSPECTIVE
Lane is a Leavenworth senior in psychology.
Government preparing nation for horrors of nuclear scenario
GUEST COMMENTARY
Your government is telling you to prepare for nuclear war. That's right,you read correctly: nuclear
In this 21st century post-Cold-War world, Americans are being told to prepare for the unthinkable horrors of a past age.
In the highest levels of government, both here and in the United Kingdom, policy-makers are pondering the most terrible destructive weapons ever produced.
Jonathan Sternberg opinion@hansan.com
What, you ask, is the reason for such discussion? The prospective war in Iraq.
During the past few months, many signs of impending nuclear danger have arisen.
On Jan. 26, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. articulated the Bush administration's position that, should Iraq use chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction, the United States would respond in with our weapons of mass destruction, which are only nuclear even though Iraq does not possess nuclear capability.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 5 said, according to CNN.com, that "no sane person would wish to see that happen," but the Bush administration had nonetheless drawn up scenarios for just such a contingency.
This was the first major threat of this sort from the United States, barring several gaffes between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in 1998, since the Reagan administration.
I first became aware of the impending danger when I was perusing the CNN Web site a few weeks back. I followed a link to a Federal Emergency Management Agency document entitled "Are You Ready?", which was available from the agency at
This document, which instructs Americans on how to prepare for everything from tornadoes to radiological dispersal devices, spends five long pages discussing the horrors of nuclear war and contains instructions on how to build and/or locate a fallout shelter in or near your home.
Moreover, much like the "manuals" published by the government during the Cold War, the information contained in the manuals is, at best, misleadingly hopeful.
www.fema.gov/areyouready.
The U.S. government has not published a document like this since the height of the Cold War in 1987.
As President Kennedy said in 1962, "The survivors ... would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors."
The most likely way the war would start an international nuclear chain of events would be for Iraq either to use chemical or biological weapons on either American and/or British troops, which the Department of Defense considers "highly likely," or to fire a weapons-of-mass-destruction-laden Scud missile at Israel.
As early as Oct. 11, the National Journal published the Bush administration's nuclear war scenarios for Iraq.
In either case, Iraq would receive a
nuclear blow, as the United States, Britain and Israel have all promised to retaliate as Card previously warned. Should this occur, the Arab world would be in immediate and uncontrollable chaos.
According to the National Journal, the Bush administration thinks the first and most likely Middle-Eastern government to fall would be Pakistan, which is a fledgling nuclear power.
The new Muslim-fundamentalist government, now armed with nuclear muscle and incapable of attacking coalition or Israeli forces with its ultrashort-range ballistic missiles, would instead hit its most hated neighbor, India, as it continually threatens.
Even if the nuclear chain ends there, the fallout from the thousand megatons of destruction on the subcontinent alone would likely kill most Americans and millions of others around the world after wafting across the Pacific, according to a Department of Defense study in 1999.
Such a war, however, would be unlikely to stop there.
India is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, Britain is a member of NATO with the United States, and Pakistan is allied with North Korea and China, a whole other caboodle of problems.
Unthinkable world war would ensue and, as Premier Nikita Khrushchev said in 1963, "The survivors would envy the dead."
In the meantime, then, I suggest you party as hard as you possibly can.
Sternberg is a Leawood senior in history.
TALKTOUS
Jenna Goenfert and Justin Hennning
Kristi Henderson
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864-4854 or jgpeefert@kansan.com and
ihenningo@kansan.com
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Amanda Sears and Lindsay Hanson opinion editors 864-4924 or opinion@kansan.com
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business manager
864-4358 or adsales.kansan.com
Sarah Jantz
retail sales manager
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general manager and news advisen
664-7687 or mgibson@kansan.com
Matt Fisher
Matt Fisher sales and marketing adviser 864-7666 or mfisher@kansan.com
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The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length, or reject all submissions. For any questions, call Amanda Sears or Lindsay Hanson at 864-4924 or e-mail at opinion@kansan.com. If you have general questions or comments, e-mail the readers' representative at readersrep@kansan.com.
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