Considerettes

I haven’t been able to get to the Goldberg piece today. Hopefully tommorrow.

Did you see this headline in your morning paper: “Discretionary federal spending to rise in 2004 by more than double the rate of inflation”? Funny, neither did David Frum.

France is now proposing that we, essentially, turn the inspectors into detectives, possibly “doubling or tripling the number of inspectors”. If they Iraq doesn’t comply, we’ll just…keep inspecting. They claimed that the inspections are working, although since we know there are weapons unaccounted for and the inspectors haven’t uncovered them, what do they mean by “working”?

Was he listening?

Bill Kristol on Fox News Channel: What kind of world will we wind up in if we say to dictators, “If you make nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, we’re too scared to do anything about it”?

(Answer: Extremely dangerous.)

Just a thought…

UN 1441 said that Iraq would face serious consequences if they did not comply. Given France’s & Germany’s position, do they intend to say that passing another resolution would constitute “serious” consequences? What do they really mean by “serious” consequences?

The best visual aid presented by Powell was the one showing which countries are in the strike area of Iraqi weapons, given that Iraq has not limited the range of their missiles. Kinda brought the point home, I hope.

The best idea presented was that Iraq had changed not one iota since before UN resolution 1441 (indeed for the past 12 years and 17 resolutions). How will one more resolution or more time make things any different?

For perspective, Scott Ott has a list of items that Colin Powell did (or really, should have) added to his UN presentation that would really get Democrats on board. Too funny, yet too true. (Found the link via InstaPundit.)

Powell’s showing amazing photographic evidence of how Iraq bulldozed chemical weapons plants so that they wouldn’t be found by inspectors. He’s enumerated so many instances where evidence about Iraq’s current weapons (never mind the programs) had to first be dragged out of them, and then a lot of it has never been accounted for. Thus, as the administration said, meant that Iraq was in “material breach” of UN resolution 1441 immediately upon release of their documentation supposedly detailing their weapons and the destruction of WMDs.

I’m going to be really interested to find out how the anti-war folks hand-wave this away.

Colin Powell is, as I type, making the case against Iraq to the UN. What I appreciate is that the audio he’s played so far is recent, as recent as last week, all during the inspections.

And he’s properly asserted (to the surprise, apparently, of many in the anti-war crowd) that Blix and company are “inspectors”, not “detectives”. They shouldn’t have to find a smoking gun, it should be presented to them (in a non-smoking state) for destruction.

During the day today, I’m going to try to get through a (rather lengthy) piece by The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg titled “The Unknown”. Ostensibly, it’s a report on the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but it goes much more in-depth than that. It begins in 1998, when we assumed that India was telling us the truth about not intending to test nukes and found out how wrong we were, and why. I won’t hit it all in one session, but as I find interesting points, I’ll mention them here.