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Wishful Thinking Matthew Yglesias thinks that the Administration's goal should be to get Saddam to submit to a rigorous and humilating weapons inspection, by using the threat of war, rather than actually going to war. Matt Welch agrees. I disagree. To my way of thinking the obvious answer is that there's every reason to believe Saddam will agree to a vigorous, intrusive inspections regime if that's the only way to save his own sorry ass. I also think that would be a terrific outcome ? a rogue state humiliated, the threat of WMD proliferation countered, all at minimal cost in blood and treasure. I'm of the school of thought that you prepare for war in order to be able to prevent it ? a credible military threat by the United States ought to be able to get Saddam to back down on his weapons programs (who's expansion, I believe, would lead inevitably to a big war down the road if he ever got nukes) without us needing to actually fight him. OK, so we get inspectors in. We find some of his weapons labs, and hope that we've found them all. We leave him in power. Now what? Do the inspectors stay in indefinitely? That's what we tried in the nineties. The rest of the scenario will repeat as well. Tariq Aziz will start whining about "spies" and "deprivation of the Iraqi people of their sacred sovereignty," and the French will sympathize, because they want to sell stuff. The west will get tired, he'll continue to play the games with the inspectors, and terrorize his own people, and we still won't be sure whether or not he's still working on WMD. No, Matt and Matt, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are not rushing toward a war--they're rushing toward a regime change, just as they say. If it turns out that a war is necessary to achieve that, then war it must be, because we will never be safe for the long term as long as Saddam controls Iraq. I think, in fact, that the Administration is indeed looking at options short of war, at least in the sense of an actual invasion with US ground troops, but the goal remains, as it should, (and as it should have been a dozen years ago) to get rid of Saddam. [Update at 11:05 PM PDT] Steven Den Beste has a response to this as well, which echoes mine, but in more detail, though there's no indication that he read either Mr. Yglesias' post or this one. The new grand plan goes like this: No invasion, no war, no attack. Instead, a force of 50,000 "coercive force" inspectors go into Iraq. They work under American command, but they will be drawn from many nations, and they will use deadly force if necessary to inspect wherever they want. And in order to get Iraq to agree to this, the US would have to "forswear any unilateral military action against Iraq for as long as the inspections are working." There's more. Read the whole thing. Posted by Rand Simberg at September 05, 2002 04:19 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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It's as if it were the mid-Thirties, and Hitler had just marched the Wehrmacht back into the industrial parts of the Rhineland. What if the British and French had proposed to send inspectors into the Ruhr and Saar to make sure he didn't get up to any funny stuff? Posted by The Sanity Inspector at September 8, 2002 09:34 PMPost a comment |