I would take issue with Craven on the point of whether or not Saddam would have been able to continue his quest for weapons of mass destruction, but my quibble is only a temporal one. I think it would have taken many, many years of his under-the-table dealings with Syria and Jordan for him to have gotten the main necessary components of such weapons. Chemical weapons actually might have eventually proven easy to create. Biological weapons, i think less so. Nuclear weapons might have been beyond his reach, because of the obvious difficulties of obtaining sufficient fissionable material without anyone hostile knowing it. I agree with Craven that a lifting of sanctions would not have done us any harm. It might, arguably, have allowed him to have accelerated the attempt to acquire component materials of weapons of mass destruction. I don't buy the argument that the sanctions only hurt the Iraqi people without helping the situation though--not because i don't recognize how the Iraqui people suffered, but because i believe that they would not have been better off without sanctions. The folks in the Sunni dominated regions of Iraq were getting at least a sufficiency, while Shi'ites were left to starve, or fight for the leavings. I would opine that a good deal of the support for an "Iraqi resistance" comes from the Sunni minority in the tribal regions, because they have indeed lost with the overthrow of Hussein. Those with the most to lose from a lifting of sanctions might have been the Kurds, because i doubt that Hussein would ever have given up trying to crush them--and the Turks would have helped in this effort to the extent that they continue to attempt to crush any Kurdish independence movement in their own territory. I'm not charging the Turks with having been in cahoots, simply that their policy coincidentally matched Hussein's.
All of which leads me to suggest that Bush was justified up to the point of putting pressure on Iraq to comply with Security Council Resolutions 686, and particularly with Resolution 687, paragraph 10 of which reads:
In Resolution 687, the Security Council wrote:Decides further that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 [i.e., referrring to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons], and request the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Special Commission, to develop a plan for the future ongoing monitoring and verification of Iraq's compliance with the present paragraph, to be submitted to the Coucil for approval within one hundred and twenty days of the passage of the present resolution;
but that Resolution 1440 was unnecessary. This was, in my view, a transparent attempt to get authority for immediate military action, and sufficiently transparent that the Security Council was not suckered by it. Had the administration continued the pressure on Hussein with the authority of the earlier resolutions, leaving aside 1440, there is every reason to suggest that it might have been possible to eventually, and likely sooner than later, close all of the rat holes through which he smuggled out his oil, and smuggled in dollars. I think the administration was not, however, operating in good faith from the beginning, and intended war from the outset, which is despicable and worthy of condemnation. The war was not necessary to draw Hussein's sting; contentions of Iraq being a likely sources of weapons of mass destruction for terrorist seem to me absurd. No Wahabbi was ever welcome in Iraq during Hussein's tenure, and i therefore doubt that any Al Quaeda operative would have been welcome. Now that he's gone, it is very possible (i couldn't estimate how likely, though) that Al Quaeda operatives would be in Iraq in the hope of killing Americans. Even without the traditional animus between the secular Iraqi state of Hussein and the radical religious terrorists, a continued pressure under the simple provision of paragraph 10 of Resolution 687 would have proven sufficient, in my opinion, to assure that Hussein didn't share his toys with others. That is why i stated my opposition to the war from the outset.
As for North Korea, that tragedy has festered for a long time, and is likely to continue to do so. I find it noteworthy that in a series of NPR news analysis pieces i've heard, the North Koreans interviewed in China and South Korea, where they had fled to escape the starvation, emphatically stated that they had previously had no information that food aid and petroleum were being provided to Pyongyang. This is a very tense situation, and needs to be handled carefully--so i despair of this administration's ability to handle the situation intelligently. The aid granted to Pyongyang in the Clinton administration was not a bad idea, but perhaps more than a little naive--Clinton's administration deserves no credit in this one, they seem to have been just as clueless about Kim Jong Il and his motives and methods as is the Bush administration today. Any food aid and petroleum we provide will simply be used to assure that the army is fed, and maintains the highest mobility its resources will allow. The analyses i have read and heard broadcast suggest that Kim has two, perhaps as many as four, nuclear war heads. I don't think North Korea can spread the devastation which HB seems to suggest, but i agree with him completely that "Joe Ching" (the name G.I.'s give to the North Koreans) would spead as much destruction as they were capable of in the event of war. It is significant that North Korea has been for a generation or more, one of the world's busiest sellers of short- and medium-range ballistic missles (with Brazil and China), and simply with conventional warheads, they could easily drag China and Japan into such a conflict, while raining indiscriminate death upon the the South. I only disagree with HB as to the degree of the holocaust, he is right on target that such a move would result in disaster for the western Pacific rim. With the current administration, the contemplation of the Korean situation makes me very nervous indeed.
