Edited by author 03-22-2003 12:19 PM
Dan Z,

First off, thanks for posting viable alternatives, even though the French have actually prevented them from actually being viable. It shows that you have actually studied the situation.

Second, a note about "inspections", coercive or otherwise:

Iraq is a body larger than the state of California. One U-Haul full of Chemical weapons could wipe out a town, or one nuke the size of a van (Saddam was working on minituarizing it so it would fit on a missile when the Israelis bombed their enrichment site and inspectors forced their sites to move and hide) is a MAJOR threat. Do you think that YOU could find a place in ALL OF CALIFORNIA to hide that UHaul where it couldn't be found? It could be under a pile of cars in a junkyard, or in your own basement, but the INspectors only have 60-100 people in the ENTIRE STATE of California to find it.... Now figure that a SINGLE VIAL of Anthrax the size of your thumb can be bred into a TON of Anthax in about a week. Can you hide a vial that small in the entire State of California so that 60 people looking for it cannot find it?

Inspectors were SUPPOSED to be just that: Inspectors. NOT detectives.

Saddam was supposed to declare ALL of his WMD's in 1992, and the inspectors job was to go to those sites that Saddam declared and tag and destroy those weapons. The inspectors started showing up and NOTHING was there... Suddenly their roles shifted to something that they weren't SUPPOSED to be, which is detectives. If Saddam was forthcoming, the inspections would have been completed in 1993, but since Saddam was hiding and lying, their job took over 12 years with little results. Now, that's ONLY going on what Saddam DECLARED in 1992! Do you REALLY think he declared EVERYTHING? We could only find and oversee destruction of about 2/3 of what he DECLARED, and assuming he didn't have more, or build more in the past 12 YEARS, is a tad naieve.

Even sending in an entire ARMY to find and destroy all the WMDs isn't sufficient. I'm SURE Saddam has some of his weapons hidden in Syria, UAE, Qatar, Somalia, Libya, etc. I mean he had 12 YEARS to move/hide them, how dumb would he have to be to keep them where they could be found?

The answer is to remove the person that would USE them. If he had 100,000 WMDs it wouldnt matter if the person in control of them was not the violent, sociopathic dictator that would actually use them.

Think of it like this: We have found a mass murderer, so instead of throwing him in jail, we instead we go into his house and destroy all of the knives and guns and let him go... Not the best way of dealing with it in my eyes.

Inspections could ONLY work if Saddam was OPEN and HONEST about his stockpile. He's lied so many times that it's crystal clear that he's NOT telling the truth. Even Blix admits it (see my post below), and without Saddam telling them what he has and where, even 10,000 inspectors and 100 years won't disarm him properly.