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.”

…

Simply unbelievable. There are so many fantasies involved in this plan as to suggest the use of illicit chemical substances by those who drafted it. Let’s see:

Other nations would actually offer such forces.

They’d be willing to let Americans command them rather than have a Yugoslavia-style coalition command.

They’d be willing to let Americans order them into combat without the home government’s approval.

They’d be willing to do this soon.

Iraq would be willing to let such a force in, soon.

The forces themselves would actually be trustworthy, and not tip off the Iraqis or accept bribes, and actually willing to fight if ordered to by Americans.
A force of 50,000 troops like this, split into brigades, wouldn’t ever be subject to ambush.

The first time parts of it actually took substantial losses, everyone would stay the course.

And there’s this one: America would be willing to accept any such lunacy.

The biggest problem of all with it, however, is that it assumes that such a force, which would take months to organize (during which time Iraq would be frantically hiding everything they could) would actually be able to find and destroy enough stuff soon enough to actually prevent Iraq from making a bomb.

There’s more. Read the whole thing.

The Federal Observer has a new top-ten list of reasons to ban guns.

On Sunday, when the fire up in San Gabriel Canyon started, the reports were that it was due to a lightning strike. That seemed likely at the time, because there were a lot of thunderheads over the mountains. Here’s the view from my balcony in Redondo Beach about mid-afternoon on Sunday, a couple hours after it started.

Note the rain clouds above the mountains, particularly the flying-saucer-like cloud above the fire. The smoke from the fire itself can be seen to be rising up toward the clouds.

But now the Pasadena Star is reporting that the Forest Service claims that it was started by candles from a pagan ceremony.

Craig Couvault reports that our fragile and unreliable launch infrastructure isn’t just important for commercial space activities. It may be affecting our ability to effectively prosecute the war.

Nearly a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency lack two $1-billion secret eavesdropping spacecraft that should have been operational by now to provide critical intelligence to help track terrorist operations and plan for a possible war with Iraq.

The story also says that NRO may be responding as ineptly and ineffectively as the FBI and other government agencies. Former NRO engineer Dave Thompson rakes them over the coals. I’ve always been impressed by Dave, who remains a straight shooter, even if it puts his business in jeopardy (NRO is a primary customer of Spectrum Astro).

“NRO exhibits an astounding lack of revolutionary innovation to get Al Qaeda,” said David Thompson, president and CEO of Spectrum Astro, a company that has contracts with NRO and other military programs. “Over the past decade, the NRO has posted a sorry decline into mediocrity and aristocracy.” Before moving to the private sector, Thompson was an engineer at NRO.

He said NRO has not “done anything to make innovative new satellites to fight Al Qaeda.”

His remarks, little noticed at the time, were made four months ago at a Space Foundation dinner in Colorado Springs. If the changes delaying the payload will help it better monitor Al Qaeda or Iraq, it might help blunt some of Thompson’s criticism.

“The NRO has suffered a shocking decline in the technical performance of its satellites over the past several years,” he said. “They haven’t told you about that because it has been kept behind closed doors.

“Many NRO satellites never even got launched as they meandered their way through years of technical and program ‘management mismanagement,’ yet no one was held accountable. NRO is actually moving backward, getting less capability and fielding less capable technology for the future,” he noted.

Yup, I feel better now. At least we got that shiny new office building out in Reston, for all those unaccounted-for billions we’ve given to them.

A Brit, who disagrees with US policy, says that despite that, it’s dumb to call Americans dumb.

I’ve been remiss, and so busy lately, that I haven’t been keeping up with my favorite news source–the Weekly World News. I’ve particularly fallen behind on the heart-rending saga of Bat Boy.

But I was fascinated to learn today, in perusing the recent headlines, that the Confederacy was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, with the ostensible purpose of destroying Washington, DC, and thus bringing to a rapid conclusion the War of Northern Aggression.

I was particularly enlightened by these lines:

?Thaddeus McMullen was a plantation slave-owner who loathed Abraham Lincoln and was willing to do anything to ensure a Confederate victory.

?He was also a brilliant researcher and scientist — in league with Albert Einstein. This made for a horrifying combination that almost resulted in the fiery deaths of thousands of innocent people.?

And here, all this time, I thought that Al Einstein was born years after the end of the war.

It almost makes me question the veracity of the story. I’d hate to think that my favorite news publication would ever publish anything that isn’t true.

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

It’s hard to work up much more anger at Reuters, these days, but this might do it. It’s the caption to a picure of the WTC-less work site in downtown Manhattan. Note the scare quotes on “war on terror”:

Recovery and debris removal work continues at the site of the World Trade Center known as “ground zero” in New York, March 25, 2002. Human rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. “war on terror” since September 11.

Yes, right. That should always be the lead of any story about the horrendous attack on American soil almost a year ago. That human rights around the world are deteriorating as a result of our response to it.

You know, like the right to slash a flight attendant’s throat, and fly her airplane into the side of a skyscraper. Or the right to strap high explosives to your midriff and scatter Jewish baby parts all over with it. Our fundamental rights are under attack.

Let’s see if the blogosphere has any power. Maybe if we generate enough outrage, they’ll reconsider it, and change it.

[Thanks to “JMiller” via email]

Instantman informs us that my latest column is up at Tech Central Station. The author’s always the last to know…

For those interested, I get medieval on the sustainable developers’ asses.

[12 PM Update]

Reader Chris Savage picks a nit, and math checks my ass:

A little poetic license here:

“The reality is that the notion of anything off planet representing a resource is anathema to them. For one thing, it would imply essentially unlimited resources for the foreseeable future, since the amount of energy and useful material in space vastly exceeds that on the single tiny planet on which we evolved, which in turn represents such an infinitesimal fraction of the universe that this column would run way over page limit were I simply to write the number of zeros required after the decimal point, and before the one, to express it. ”

Let’s assume that the universe is a sphere 20 billion light-years across.

Then, assuming my math is right, the volume of the universe is roughly 10^110 cubic angstroms.

If we assume that the Earth’s resources are proportional to its volume, that turns out to be roughly 10^60 cubic angstroms.

It follows that Earth’s share of the resources of the entire universe is no less than about 1/10^50, or, roughly:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001,

or:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000001%

Now, your basic point is valid: if we could effectively access the resources available off-planet, we’d have gobs more resources. But it doesn’t take *that* many zeros to express either how big the universe is, or how small our piece of it is.

Check my math, but I could be off by a factor of, say, 10^60 and only add one line to your article… [g]>

Well, Chris, you just don’t know how vicious Tech Central editor Nick Schultz is for authors who go over word count.

Actually, I don’t either, but I don’t want to find out…