October 03, 2004

How you fail the global test

And secondly, to think that another round of resolutions would have caused Saddam Hussein to disarm, disclose, is ludicrous, in my judgment. It just shows a significant difference of opinion.

We tried diplomacy. We did our best. He was hoping to turn a blind eye. And, yes, he would have been stronger had we not dealt with him. He had the capability of making weapons, and he would have made weapons.

Would a second round of resolutions have caused Saddam to disarm? Perhaps not. Here are just some of the upsides and downsides:

Upsides:
- The U.S. could show that it was doing its best to try diplomacy first rather than just rushing to war...
- The U.S. could use evidence that Iraq was preventing the inspectors from doing their job against Iraq...
- Those organizations and countries that were arguing for more inspections would have lost some credibility if inspections could be shown to have failed...
- It would have given us more time to bribe other countries into supporting us...

Downsides:
- Iraq would perhaps be stronger...
- Iraq could destroy or move its WMD to other countries...
- The U.S. or the world might lose interest in the time it took to complete more inspections...

Even if more inspections had failed, our case against Iraq would have been much stronger. We could point to recent evidence that inspections had failed. We could say we've done everything we could have done.

If we had then gone to war, France and Germany might have disagreed with our decision, but they couldn't disagree that we had no other option. If they tried to present yet another round of inspections as a possibility, we could reference our earlier comments: "we tried it your way and it didn't work, so now we're going to do it our way."

Pre-war articles about inspections here and here; I'm sure there are many more and also many from recently.

Other ways to fail the global test include:

- Using the aluminum tubes as evidence (in the debate, Kerry noted Powell having to apologize for his U.N. speech)

- failing to secure the nuke sites in Iraq after the invasion

- failing to secure the hdqtrs of Iraq's spy agency... (see also "Press and looters vie for Saddam's secrets")

- failing to secure Iraq's national library...

- failing to keep tap water and electricity flowing...

- failing to protect the Iraqi national museum...

Some of those - such as the museum - might have been beyond our control or too costly to prevent. However, with a plan that had covered all contingencies - including what happened after Shock & Awe - they could have either been prevented or - once again how we look is important - we could provide proof that we had done what we had to do.

I might update this post with other examples later.

Previous discussion of the global test here. I've left comments about the test here, here, here, here. --- A previous comment was at redstate.org/story/2004/10/2/151528/353

Posted to Politics at October 3, 2004 02:59 PM

Comments

It is interesting that a guy could be hardheaded and rational on immigration issue and be such a mushhead about Iraq.

Are there multiple personalities in Lonewacko?

Posted by: kufar at October 3, 2004 08:57 PM

The resolution being pondered was something like the 19th resolution on Iraq. France and Germany were never going to be convinced, unless perhaps an American city had turned into a sheet of glass, in which case they wouldn't have a say, anyway. But Lone Wacko is free to vote for Kerry. In fact, I think he should vote for Kerry. Then we won't have to worry about immigration issues with Mexico, because this will become one big, happy, Spanish-speaking country.

Posted by: Zhang Fei at October 3, 2004 09:47 PM

The illegal immigration issue is a matter of protecting our borders, our lives, etc.

Sudam didn't even have an air force to put up. The intelligence community is tired of being blamed for Bush and crowd twisting info. Will you read that the pipes were not of the type? Bush & crowd lied to go to war. Powell knows it now too. Also, agree that things have been grossly mismanaged re utilities, etc. for Iraqi people. Meanwhile, we have built a huge expensive embassy. And, we have built 18 military bases there. We may agree to disagree on some factors of.

As from the Thinking Independent Grouping, I think Hussein had nothing and was playing poker
to save face. However, I think Bush and crowd were
smart enought to be playing checkers and were snared by the terrorists. One more colonial powere going in there.

Posted by: Alex at October 4, 2004 05:43 PM