Well, if you think it would have been politically feasible to take attention off Iraq, and decide to invade in a year or two - say in the middle of 2004 - would you please explain how to deal with certain non-debatable political realities:
1 it would be in the middle of a Presidential election, when chances of getting Democratic party support would be slim to none
2 the impetus provided by the Sept 11th attacks might have dissipated by that time, and it would have been extremely difficult to get public support. Ken Pollack might believe his own well-researched case (& I do), but what he seems oblivious to, is how things play in American politics.
3 since containment (but for the on-going American air patrols) would have been completely gone for a couple of years, Saddam might have succeeded in buying a nuke or some fissible material by then. He certainly had the money & kept trying. And the North Koreans would be most willing sellers. Where there's such a will, there's usually a way.
And that's assuming the more feasible case, that the Bush administration delayed paying attention to Iraq until 2004.
The case that keeps being brought up, parking 200,000 American soldiers in the desert for two years, I consider self-evidently absurd, though not to some people it seems. Can you think of a more expressive show of weakness than assembling a great army to intimidate, then not daring to use it when it fails to achieve its object? |
