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I’ve been reading a bunnch of political blogs this afternoon (while i should be learning chinese…) and basically I’ve been bouncing back and forth between MaxSpeaks, an excellent lefty blog, some big hitters post there, and following his links to pro war blogs, (here are two, here and here). They get all into the Intricacies of the argument, but I think it’s a lot simplier. The anti war people should be pounding home how much this war will cost in money (1-2% of the GDP for the war, plus the money to rebuild Iraq) and in potential live. The way for Saddam to win this war is to maximise casualties, american and civilian. Plus the complete unknown of the political fallout after the war. The pro war people seem to think that a destabalized middle east is a good thing because somehow a jeffersonian democracy will emerge from the ruble. They seem to forget the fact that the strongest opposition groups in the middle east are islamic fundamentalist groups and that we would be replacing “corrupt regimes freindly with the US to curropt regimes that hate the US,” (i stole this qoute from somewhere, but I can’t remember). Not to mention the huge problems we are going to have between turkey and our Kurdish allies. What do we do if they start to fight? All this to stop Saddam from building WMDs. I think its clear that he can be contained diplomatically. Saddam is rather erratic but he isn’t Osama Bin Laden. He has an incentive to stay in power. If we give him enough space to maintain power he can be convinced to not build WMDs. This will probably involve weapons inspectors and political pressur. Plus good intelligence which might not happen.
If Saddam is a bad boy… I’m not sure, i do know that one of our main prioties should be to get international support to help pay for the mess of a war in Iraq.