A thought-provoking article in Foreign Policy magazine on whether war with Iraq is necessary. I’ve never felt quite so conflicted about foreign policy before. I want us to go into Iraq and decimate Saddam & Co. But I am not convinced he poses a true threat to the US, now or in the future. Frankly, I’m more scared of the psychos in North Korea.

The article’s most compelling argument is that we can deter Saddam fairly easily if we wanted to:

“It [deterrence] only takes a leader who wants to stay alive and who wants to remain in power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career, Saddam Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two goals are absolutely paramount. That is why deterrence and containment would work. If the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent. This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range consequences, it will still have been unnecessary….”

I guess all these arguments are beside the point, since it’s fairly obvious we’ll be at war within three weeks. I do think the world will be a better place without him. Since we are going in, let’s just hope we know what we’re doing and know the way out.

I just find the whole thing a bit surreal. How did it all shift from Osama to Saddam? What happened?