So here’s my obligatory daily “Hey, I agree with what this guy says about Iraq” article which will make folks who agree with me nod and folks who disagree with me shake their heads.”
So where does anyone get the idea that the already improbable aim of fully disarming Saddam would be the end of the threat? The only possible hope of containing him would be to keep the American military breathing down his neck, send in enough inspectors to monitor every day, in every way, every inch of Saddam-controlled turf–and also close the roads. Forever. Or at least until Saddam and his horrible hand-trained sons and heirs are gone. Which, unless “disarmament” can be expanded to include the bulldozing of Saddam’s internal security apparatus, the Mukhabarat, could take longer than we’ve got.
Perhaps France, Germany, Russia and such pivotal U.N. Security Council members as Guinea and Cameroon would care to shoulder the costs, and risks, of sending their own troops to replace the current U.S. military force in the gulf–that vast military presence being the only true source of all this vaunted pressure on Saddam. Though without President Bush’s credible threat of war, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin would soon find themselves wielding all the pressure of a bicycle pump.
The dollar cost is, of course, the least of it. If all we do with Saddam, after his dozen years of gross and threatening infractions, is keep trying to disarm and contain him, then the message to tyrants everywhere is that there is no significant penalty to seeking weapons of mass murder. The only risk is that inspectors might find them, and you might then have to destroy whatever they actually found. The downside is that you might be out the cost of the weapons. The upside, if you succeed, is that you become North Korea–protected by your power to destroy.