Matthew Yglesias thinks that the Administration’s goal should be to get Saddam to submit to a rigorous and humilating weapons inspection, by using the threat of war, rather than actually going to war. Matt Welch agrees.

I disagree.

To my way of thinking the obvious answer is that there’s every reason to believe Saddam will agree to a vigorous, intrusive inspections regime if that’s the only way to save his own sorry ass. I also think that would be a terrific outcome ? a rogue state humiliated, the threat of WMD proliferation countered, all at minimal cost in blood and treasure. I’m of the school of thought that you prepare for war in order to be able to prevent it ? a credible military threat by the United States ought to be able to get Saddam to back down on his weapons programs (who’s expansion, I believe, would lead inevitably to a big war down the road if he ever got nukes) without us needing to actually fight him.

OK, so we get inspectors in. We find some of his weapons labs, and hope that we’ve found them all. We leave him in power.

Now what? Do the inspectors stay in indefinitely? That’s what we tried in the nineties. The rest of the scenario will repeat as well. Tariq Aziz will start whining about “spies” and “deprivation of the Iraqi people of their sacred sovereignty,” and the French will sympathize, because they want to sell stuff. The west will get tired, he’ll continue to play the games with the inspectors, and terrorize his own people, and we still won’t be sure whether or not he’s still working on WMD.

No, Matt and Matt, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are not rushing toward a war–they’re rushing toward a regime change, just as they say. If it turns out that a war is necessary to achieve that, then war it must be, because we will never be safe for the long term as long as Saddam controls Iraq. I think, in fact, that the Administration is indeed looking at options short of war, at least in the sense of an actual invasion with US ground troops, but the goal remains, as it should, (and as it should have been a dozen years ago) to get rid of Saddam.

[Update at 11:05 PM PDT]

Steven Den Beste has a response to this as well, which echoes mine, but in more detail, though there’s no indication that he read either Mr. Yglesias’ post or this one.

The new grand plan goes like this: No invasion, no war, no attack. Instead, a force of 50,000 “coercive force” inspectors go into Iraq. They work under American command, but they will be drawn from many nations, and they will use deadly force if necessary to inspect wherever they want. And in order to get Iraq to agree to this, the US would have to “forswear any unilateral military action against Iraq for as long as the inspections are working.”

…

Simply unbelievable. There are so many fantasies involved in this plan as to suggest the use of illicit chemical substances by those who drafted it. Let’s see:

Other nations would actually offer such forces.

They’d be willing to let Americans command them rather than have a Yugoslavia-style coalition command.

They’d be willing to let Americans order them into combat without the home government’s approval.

They’d be willing to do this soon.

Iraq would be willing to let such a force in, soon.

The forces themselves would actually be trustworthy, and not tip off the Iraqis or accept bribes, and actually willing to fight if ordered to by Americans.
A force of 50,000 troops like this, split into brigades, wouldn’t ever be subject to ambush.

The first time parts of it actually took substantial losses, everyone would stay the course.

And there’s this one: America would be willing to accept any such lunacy.

The biggest problem of all with it, however, is that it assumes that such a force, which would take months to organize (during which time Iraq would be frantically hiding everything they could) would actually be able to find and destroy enough stuff soon enough to actually prevent Iraq from making a bomb.

There’s more. Read the whole thing.