September 19, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Lileks has another list of
Lileks has another list of reasons that he doesn't think inspections will work.
Now, I know that I am going to be accused of simply not wanting inspections; after all, I've been hawkish on Iraq for months. But the honest truth is that I didn't think inspections were on the table until recently. Initially, when I thought that they were, I was enthusiastic. Now I'm less enthusiastic, but not, thank you very much, because I think it would be fun to invade Iraq.
I just have a lot of questions that I haven't seen answered. The enthusiastically pro-inspections crowd seems to me to be proceeding on the assumption that there is some combination of inspections and sanctions that will meet what we all seem to agree is now the goal, which is preventing Saddaam from having WMD in violation of the numerous UN security resolutions saying he's not allowed to do same.
This is not, however, some law of nature that has to be so. The fact that we want inspections to work doesn't mean that they will if we just get the right regime, any more than the fact that we want markets to work means that they will provide us every last thing we hope and dream for.
Which is not to say that inspections can't work. But I have some serious concerns that I haven't seen anyone attempt to answer:
1) How will we find the stuff? Saddaam has had over three years to hide it.
2) How do we prevent shell games? The answer is massive simultaneous inspections, as far as I can tell. So massive that they would constitute a de-facto invasion. Otherwise, Saddaam will just move the stuff from place to place, as he did under the earlier regime. We would also, I think, have to helicopter marines and inspectors around in massive force just to keep Saddaam from knowing where we were going -- as Butler said, anything more than an hour outside Baghdad was a joke, because they were waiting for them
3) How do we get key people to talk to us when if they tell us anything, Saddaam will shoot them?
4) What are we prepared to do about the low level stunts that, in aggregate, degrade our capability? "I can't find the key" "The guy who knows that is not here today" "That paperwork is not ready yet" -- this was what Saddaam used to delay previous inspectors, very successfully. Are we committed to blowing up key infrastructure pieces if we can't inspect immediately?
5) How do we get around the problem of "Yes, sahib, no sahib, I don't know, sahib." Which is to say, Iraqis playing dumb and deliberately wasting our time on stupid things? Lileks gives the example of "What is that iron plate in the floor?" which, after five days of screwing around with it, turns out to be an old oil pit from a garage. We could spend a lot of time defusing toasters and such, if the Iraqis had a mind to make us. Possibly this would be against their interest. But not if it gives them time to hide other stuff. Which brings us back to my original point, which is that any really serious regime is going to look a whole lot like an invasion.
6) How long will support last after we kick down the door of the first mosque? Or the first hospital gets detonated because of Iraq's delaying tactics?
7) What is our exit strategy? The answer is, we don't have one. Inspections will have to continue until Iraq has a democracy, or at least someone less nutty at the helm. The problem is, no sanctions regime can stay robust for that amount of time.
It goes back to Brink Lindsey's point, which I think is true: Iraq does not want to prove to us that it has gotten rid of WMD. Iraq's goal, almost everyone but the wing nuts can agree, is to keep us from finding their WMD, yet still having the WMD. On a related note, my personal opinion is that Saddaam believes -- IMHO correctly -- that if we find out what he's doing, it will take away all his international support.
Yes, they want not to be invaded. But that does not mean that they will not play games if they think they can get away with it. And preventing them from getting away with it would, in my estimation, require at the very least tens of thousands of American soldiers to be stationed there indefinitely.
Let's remove the PC elements. Let's pretend that Iraq is Texas. And that the governor of Texas (who is of course a Democrat), does not want us to find his hidden oil reserves. Let's also pretend that everyone in the state either supports him, or is deadly afraid of the consequences to themselves and their families if they assist inspectors in any way. Finally, let's pretend that there is no documentation on file for the last four years, and very spotty, deliberately screwed up, documentation from before that.
You're the inspector. How do you find the oil reserves? How many men would it take you to find all the oil? Every last drop? With the entire state trying to help the governor hide it? Just picture the logistics. You, and say, 300 guys, chasing oil trucks across Texas, plumbing underground reserves, with every redneck in Texas playing dumb and saying "Well, I don't know, I can't remember as we had that cave on the property last year or not."
My Aunt Fanny, you could. To find the reserves, you'd have use massive manpower to cordon off the state, moving inward, sweeping every single building you came to. Meanwhile, people start dying because the trucks you thought were oil were actually water or bleach for the hospital wards or whatever. You'd have to be prepared for people who shot back when they sensed they were about to get caught. In other words, it would be an invasion. It might cost fewer American lives; it might also cause huge casualty figures when we detonated a gas munitions dump. Either way, it is not the prim group of clever agents swashbuckling about Iraq with white gloves on, uncovering Saddaam's weapons programs through a combination of savoire faire and sheer pluck, that the "Inspection, not war" crowd seems to be envisioning. I mean, I don't know that this is what they're thinking. They may have a comprehensive roadmap, full of practical details rather than nice sounding buzzwords, as to how this would all actually work, and be effective. I just haven't seen it.
Meanwhile, I don't think inspections will work. And I think that if we can find a regime that would actually be effective, Saddaam will turn it down. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 19, 2002 12:46 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links