Regime change for Iraq
I am against any kind of war action with Iraq. If Iraq really has the “weapons of mass destruction” that the U.S. and Britain claim, war would only provoke Iraq into using them. If it turns out after a war that they didn’t have the weapons claimed, then it would be embarassingly clear that the war effort was nothing more than a multi-billion dollar bail-out blood-bath for the oil industry (Shell and Chevron have been lobbying for drilling rights in Iraq for decades). An interesting quote from The Economist:
Inspections cannot be a substitute for the [United Nations] Security Council’s rediscovering the will to force Iraq to give up its illegal weapons. So far Russia and France have been all too ready to explore any option but war, reinforcing the impression Mr Hussein gained from his defeat of inspections last time: that, come a crunch, the council will do little more than wring its hands. America and Britain, for their part, stand accused of looking for any pretext to go to war in order to oust Mr Hussein from power. In truth, maintaining the distinction between disarmament and regime change (America barely tries) is virtually impossible while Mr Hussein insists on holding on to his weapons as well as his power. So is the regime-change lobby right: the only way to force Iraq to rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction is to get rid of the regime that builds them?
There is only one way of both disarming Iraq and proving the regime-changers wrong. That is for the Security Council to tell Mr Hussein unmistakably that he will be stripped of his weapons, by force if need be. The choice is then his.