Since "Where are his WMDs? We haven't proven that he has them..." is likely to come up one of the latest set of excuses and evasions from the anti-liberation camp, it seemed like a good idea to send you to this post by Andrew Northrup, a.k.a. The Poor Man. Besides which, it's damn funny. My favourite excerpt from his imaginary dialogue:
"Q: Yes, but why would he go through this decade-long ordeal and then not use them? What is the point? Why stake so much on having a WMD program and then, when everything is on the line, not use them? Did he write off tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue to develop these weapons just so he could sneakily hide them and make the US look stupid after they've killed him? Did he do it all just to set up a kind crazy poison Easter egg hunt? Will the locations of the WMD caches be revealed through a sequence of rhyming riddles, each one more fiendishly cunning than the last? What kind of sense does that make?Alternatively, you can go with the Joe Katzman short response: "Relax, the war has only been over for a little while. We need to give the inspections time to work..." Then smile.A: What kind of sense does any of this make? Why not just do what the UN asked in 1991, or in 1994, or in 2002, for crying out loud, and then, when all the inspectors are gone and your record is cleared, start over? How long would it take to restart your programs if you could spend all that oil money freely? A year? Three? Five? In twelve years this never occured to you? And who fights a war like this? Who thinks they can beat tanks by sticking a machine gun on top of a Honda full of Syrians? Who waits for the French to ride to your rescue? What kind of military strategy is this? Name one action by Saddam Hussein over the last year, or twelve years, or twenty, which could even charitably be described as sensible? Who acts like this?
Q: I think I'm supposed to be asking the questions ..."
If this guy had a ripping WMD program, how many people would that employ? And out of those few thousand, wouldn't ONE of them have decided to tell the Americans to 'look over here' ??
(Trying... can't... resist...) Daniel, we need to give the inspections more time to work. The consequences are grave, and rushing into conclusions is the very antithesis of the sophisticated approach we need for dealing with this issue in a context of multilateralism among the various internal players in Iraq.
Let's say you're a dictator intent on having weapons of mass destruction, can't account for them all, and are crafty enough to deceive the inspectors with shell games before kicking them out altogether. This pattern of lies and deception calls for a military solution, and that's exactly what we did to Saddam Hussein.