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Old enough anyway for the writer to quote Rumsfeld in 2001, and it's been used to justify repression or repressive regimes across the globe. They are using it now, and have been for some time, to justify a war with Iran, and in turn, to help justify support for repressive regimes in nations like Bahrain and Yemen.
On the face of it there's a beguiling logic, but in truth there are dozens of reasons the UN or no single nation intervenes in any given situation, even under the most urgent or moral circumstances; sometimes those reasons are profound, sometimes shockingly mundane. What they've done is to pick the one issue, WMD, as a fear-based tripwire with everyman appeal, because, well, that's what I would do, load up on guns and bombs and dare someone to come in the front door.
Truth is though, as you know, it's easy to assemble a WMD, but hardly trivial to enrich uranium or produce plutonium. It's expensive and makes you a target. Same with other kinds of WMD. On and on. Why do that when you can see, or use, any of the other many reasons for non-intervention already in place?
There's one strange thing that everyone in this huge drama, from the MIC, to Arab despots and monarchs, to AQ, Israel, Iran, Blackwater/Halliburton, neocons, Gaddafi, down to the local radical clerics, you name it, one thing they all share in common is the conflict itself. If the game ends, they all loose power, all of them, and most will have no further reason for being. It's become its own industry.
You and I and the Arab in Tripoli, on the other hand, loose more every day that it's played. They need the fear to keep the game going, and they need to keep Arab people repressed and divided and angry.
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