The decision was between War and continued INSPECTIONS.
No, that wasn't the decision, Rascal. The decision was actually between War and "Continued inspections with a Coalition Army sitting in Kuwait poised to invade"
...because the second that army went away, the inspections would have too. So the inspections would have found nothing (since Saddam had dumped his stuff), the army would have gone home, all further inspections would have ceased, and momentum for the sanctions to be lifted would have become overwhelming (after all, hadn't Saddam just been PROVED innocent by the inspections?), the sanctions would have been lifted, then the no-fly zones would have to go (how could you justify them on a country that had just been cleared by the UN?), and then...
Saddam would be triumphant. He could have done what he liked with his oil income, taken his revenge on the Kurds and Shia, and gone shopping at AQ Khan's Sam's Club for Nukes.
Now tell me, Saddam being Saddam, isn't this the most likely scenario in the world? Does it look like a good one to you, especially post 9/11, with intelligence coming in that Saddam was aiding Ansar al Islam and planning terrorist strikes in the US, as Putin just announced?
This is the kind of nightmare scenario that real world policy makers have to consider. To me it adds up to war now, or war later at a much higher cost. One could make arguments for either side of that equation. But this la-de-dah assertion that continued inspections would have magically solved any part of the problem of Saddam is just not realistic. |
