I read a piece over at Howard Owen's blog and I had to respond. He poses a simple question:
Question for members of the Axis of Weasels: If inspections haven't worked so far, what makes you think continued inspections will do any good?
Matt Welch wrote a response from the weasel point of view:
If nothing else, there are a bunch of U.N. types roaming around the desert, forcing a terribly ineffecient dictatorship to scramble around in defiance, rather than prepare for war. The more of that, and the more time they are given -- IN THEORY -- the greater chance for actual destruction of a-hole's arsenal.
Matt goes on to say that this wasn't necessarily his view.
The piece below is my response:
As I recently wrote, the inspections are working. We've found all the components of a thriving chemical/biological weapons program.1. Delivery system. The Al Samoud 2 rocket which exceeds the range/payload allowed by the UN.
2. Payload systems. Multiple chemical warheads, empty and with no residue of chemical agents. This implies that they aren't left-over warheads that missed destruction, but newly acquired or manufactured ones.
3. Chemical/Biological payloads. No confirmation that Iraq has destroyed large quantities (tons) of previously identified chemical/biological warfare agents. In the absence of such confirmation, the working assumption must be that Iraq still has those stockpiles.
We've verified that Iraq has failed to disarm. The failure has not been the inspection process, but the UNSC, which refuses to act on this information.
As for Matt's contention that the inspections have kept Hussein from using his weapons, why didn't Saddam use them during the long years there were no inspectors? The answer is the same then as it is today: certain knowledge that the use of WMD on US targets would lead to direct reprisals which would cost him his power, if not his life.
Once he uses WMD, he's finished, and he's smart enough to know that. The only way Hussein stays in power is to keep the threat of NBC warfare alive without actually engaging in it. The actions of the UN, spearheaded by the French/German bloc, play into his plan perfectly. He remains in power, while continuing to thumb his nose at the US.
The reason we can't allow this "containment" to work is that there are other groups who can use NBC warfare without losing power because they aren't pinned to a single country. I'm referring of course to terrorists. Hussein would certainly like to use his weapons if they couldn't be traced back to him, and what better way to do that than to sell them to a terrorist group?
No containment policy can prevent Hussein from supplying terrorist groups with chem/bio weapons. That is why we must act against Hussein, and soon.
Sorry for going on so long, Howard.
I reproduced it here because I think this is the key to why we must disarm Iraq now. He has weapons that he can't use himself. The obvious move would be to sell them to somebody who could use them. Yes, we could probably trace them back to him eventually, but unless we have a receipt to bin Laden from Hussein, along with sworn testimony from Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore that the receipt is genuine, France, Germany, China, and the rest will say that the link is tenuous at best, and did not warrant military action.
Hussein could strike with impunity. He could even use the UN inspections as a cover. "I didn't sell any weapons. The inspectors didn't find any, so how could I sell them?"
The only way to prevent this scenario is to destroy the weapons at their source, and that means Iraq must disarm, or be disarmed. So far, they've shown no interest in disarming, prefering instead to circumvent the inspections while continuing their WMD programs.
The only option left on the table is to disarm them.
Posted by Rich at February 19, 2003 3:30 PM