[Trust but Verify]

I guess the anti-war people want to have it both ways. They want to say we're not giving the inspectors enough time and they also want to say we've given Saddam too much time to prepare his defenses. Which one is it?

[Cacophonous]

I don't claim to speak for all the anti-war folks, and I would encourage you to consider that those that are against this thing are not a monolithic pile (unlike, apparently, those lemmings that support it and anything with the GOP label).

As for me, I've long thought the inspections are a sham: of course Saddam Hussein has WMD (even if they haven't been found). He's had them since the '80s, when we gave them to him to help him in his war against Iran (the enemy du jour of the era).

My reaction to that is: "So what?" He is not a threat to the US, or he certainly would have used them in the last year when President Bush began thumping his war chest. The only time Saddam has used them is in a war, the one with Iran, and some claim, the Kurds. (Actually, the CIA has determined that the chem weapons that hit the Kurds came from Iran, and not Iraq.) I guess we're determined to give him his war and his excuse.

Saddam is not foolish enough to engage the US toe-to-toe in a war; he knows he will lose. But when a fellow has nothing to lose, and is backed into a corner, he will do anything.

So what have we done? We've made it clear that we are going to invade Iraq, no matter what he says he has or doesn't say, or shows what he destroyed (how would one do this? Point to a hole in the ground and say, "There one isn't?") or doesn't show, and no matter what the inspectors find or don't find.

This has been our intent all along: invade Iraq. When the linkages to 11 September were not found, not even circumstantially, we developed this sham of a WMD inspection process. It doesn't matter: we're going to invade.

We've backed him into a corner.

So what is Saddam, the rat backed in the corner with nothing to lose, going to do? He's going to launch his WMD at American troops, maybe at Israel. Why not? I repeat: HE HAS NOTHING TO LOSE. Again: HE HAS NOTHING TO LOSE.

My concerns are not with the inspections (again, a sham, as anything connected to the UN is bound to be) it is with the fact that American troops are going to get chem- or bio-bombed because we want to beat the crap out of Saddam Hussein. The loss of American troops is apparently of little concern to the neo-Con crowd.

But to close your argument: since we were going to invade all along, why didn't Bush launch an attack 30 seconds after his State of the Union speech last year? That would have been something to see, and would have been doing it right. Giving him a year to prepare himself is asinine.