[EternalHope]

Great post!

The hand-wringers are right about how bad things could get. But when it comes to alternatives, they just don't have any.

General Scowcroft is a perfect case in point. He admits Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and will use them. He then calls for more inspections to fix it! (He admits they did not work last time, but says this time we would really mean it... )

Henry Kissinger (amazingly) nailed it: Those who wail "give peace a chance" are really saying they want to wait until the other guys use a weapon of mass destruction on us first.

[the_doc]

General Scowcroft is a perfect case in point. He admits Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and will use them. He then calls for more inspections to fix it! (He admits they did not work last time, but says this time we would really mean it... )

I agree that Scowcroft is typical of the folks we have had in policymaking. It doesn't dawn on them that some things have to be done decisively and completely. The popular solutions which they offer are ultimately ineffectual--what I would call "earnest windowdressing."

They hit things with "a lick and a promise," and this often does work, but they are too short-sighted to notice when they really need to use a well-aimed and very large sledgehammer.

Their cursory, containment-oriented approach to problems definitely tends to leave huge holes (loopholes). The probability terms in the risk calculation formula remain unacceptably large.

So, by their windowdressing "solutions," they pass off the problems to the next year, the next officeholder, the next generation. It worked during the cold war, but so what? One of these days, their approach to policy is gonna get us burned very badly.

My point is that Saddam is not as reasonable as, say, a Russian premiere. Our success in winning the cold war is likely to mislead us.

Besides, who wants another cold war?

(Besides, the terrorist mess we are in is no cold war anyway.)