More on WMD's

In commenting on my entry for Wednesay, June 24, Brother Dave noted that the reason Saddam may not have fired any weapons was, in fact, tactical. The theory is that Saddam encouraged his troups to surrender, and chose not to fire any weapons, in hopes of drawing the allied troups into urban guerilla warfare.

Now, some of you with exceptionally good memories that I predicted some time back that this conflict was likely to lead to urban warfare. Since the archiving module seems to be still under construction, I can't link to my article at this moment, but I know I made that prediction.

Administration spokesfolk (like Gen. Powell) have recently been revising their definition of the conflict. When he was recently challenged on the notion that the war was over — while conflict continues — Gen. Powell said that the administration's statement that the war was over meant that the major conflict was concluded. He added that the strategists expected “pockets of conflict” from the beginning.

My memory of press releases prior to the pre-emptive strike is that the strategists believed the Iraqis would lay down their arms and would cheer the liberators. Presto! No more fighting! Limited casualties! Etc.

Well, it was a tad different than that. Folk continue to die on both sides thanks to the pockets of conflict. Guess that's the official name now — the Iraq conflict — kinda like the action in Korea was a police action (see, subverting the language is nothing new).

Naturally, the Democrats and ant-war folk have been jumping on the lack of credible evidence for WMD's like a frog on a June-bug; heck, even some Republicans have been upset by it. Unfortunately, a logical conclusion might be that if we were to find chemical or biological weapons factories, such a find would justify the attack. I would disagree strongly with that logic.

What that argument does not consider is there may have been other avenues to find the weapons. Iraqi cooperation certainly seemed to increase with troops on their border. Add an increase of inspectors, share some of that intelligence with them, and results may have happened in about the same time. This sort of "carrot & cudgel" diplomacy has been used with other recalcitrant countries with positive effect.

Of course, we'll never know if UN weapons inspectors might have found evidence of weapon production or research in this amount of time. Our Fearless Leader effectively closed down that option when he issued the command for a first strike. But the argument holds both ways — those who favored the pre-emptive strike have no way to empiracally prove that "carrot & cudgel" diplomacy would not have netted the same results in about the same amount of time.