I gave one guy 5-1 odds that there would be no attack before the end of April, and am confident it's taking candy from a baby
That's a bet you'll win. We don't have the military assets to support an attack, and there's no way we can get them there by the end of April. As I said before, you can't move an army until you have a place to move it to, and I haven't read that any of Iraq's neighbors have offered their territory as a base. That issue will have to be resolved before deployment can begin, and the deployment will take at least a month.
BBC reported today that Iraq and Kuwait have reached a "settlement" and are now good buddies. I doubt that this is more than a scrap of paper, but it does suggest that Kuwait may not be on the verge of offering to host a US invasion force.
I would expect the US to go through the ritual of demanding that Iraq accept more inspectors, force Iraq to refuse, and use that as a rationale to press for an invasion. The administration seems to have convinced many Americans that an invasion is necessary, but the the people that they have to convince do not seem persuaded. It is not the easiest of tasks, in the absence of a smoking gun. No direct connection between Iraq and 9/11 has been demonstrated. Whatever WMD and WMD deployment capacity Iraq has now is presumably what they've had since before the Gulf war: further development under the conditions they've faced since then would be very difficult. Iraq did not use WMD in that conflict, and we have yet to produce evidence that they have provided WMD to terrorists. The Iraqi regime has been involved in genocide before, but it isn't doing it now, and the measures currently in force seem adequate to protect the Kurds. It is difficult to argue that an immediate invasion is necessary to protect any threatened minority or any neighboring country.
In general, it will be very easy to make a case for the proposition that Saddam sucks, and somewhat more difficult to argue that an invasion is necessary right now.
Before people start firing up the flamethrowers, let me point out that I do not necessarily agree, at least not in full, with the argument I've laid out above. I'm just laying out the reasoning that the administration will face in its efforts to convince other countries to cooperate. |
