I expect like you that conquering Iraq won't be a big problem in terms of US troop loss or whatever, but I think Debka has a point too. Saddam has known we were coming for 11 months now. He has bio weapon capabilities. We have porous borders. You've got to believe he's thought about planting a terrorist attack ready to go in this country. How serious it would be depends on various factors-- e.g. his technical ability to aerosolize and spread some agent-- but if one American comes down with ebola or smallpox, it will be major panic. (Right now, emergency rooms are seeing serious traffic from people fearing, mistakenly, that they have nile fever.) Also, if he has the capability of torching Saudi oil fields (which I'm far from sure about, but maybe) that would be a major deal too.
IMHO we should have moved in there by October 11 to forestall these possibilities.
I agree with you on this and the other points you raised. I imagine that a great deal of preparation and contingency planning has been under way since 9-12 -- and earlier, to be fair to the FedGov. Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. are all brilliant people, who are giving GW sound advice. I might even grudgingly throw Powell into the mix (in the interest of balancing opinions). What's damned frustrating is the failure to take the appropriate steps vis border protection due to PC concerns. Add to that the unnecessary confusion regarding civil rights of US citizens vs non-citizens and combatants. It's just absurd. But I am sure that preventative and post-attack contingency planning and implemtation are moving forward. Insofar as an invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam being a necessary preventative measure, I believe that we will attack when the necessary infrastructure is in place and the proper case has been made to Congress and US allies. My guess is January 03. The longer we wait the more we risk an attack on US soil as you indicated in your piece.
I was talking with a man just the other day (I won't say anymore than that). He worked for a few months for the FBI right after 9-11- very bright man. I turned the conversation on WMD in major US cities. He said, "We are not concerned with the 6000 sleepers in America." I asked him further about it. The FBI knows of about 6000 sleepers in America and in their estimation (according to this source), none of them are intellectually capable of pulling off anything worse than a dirty bomb- a radiological bomb. But that is their concern.
I don't care about the 6000 that the FBI knows about. I care about the one or two that they don't know about. Did they know about the sleepers flying jets into the towers?