Los Angeles has many restaurants. It even has many good restaurants.

I once wondered how long it would take to try them all. I started by estimating how many there were, and then calculating how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners I would have to consume to get through the list. But then I realized that it was almost certainly impossible to do so, because many of them would close before I had a chance to get to them, and others would open that I hadn’t gotten to yet. There simply was not enough time in a serial process (and I have only one mouth, so there’s no way to parallelize it) to accomplish the task.

I was reminded of this little mental exercise by the current discussion of whether the inspectors in Iraq are doing their job properly, or even can.

In my fury over Mr. Tisdall’s blatant lie, described in my previous post, I failed to get to the end of his article, in which I found this gem:

But the fact remains that proof of serious, serial deception is so far lacking; that there has been none of the predicted Iraqi obstruction; and that the inspectors, backed by Kofi Annan, want much more time to do their job properly. And even if a “smoking gun” were found in some Basra bunker, so what? This would be a success, meaning the investigations are working.

Let’s not even bother to point out that the first sentence is blithering nonsense, as both Rumsfeld and Powell pointed out on the Sunday talk shows this weekend.

This is the latest disingenuous tactic of those opposing the removal of Saddam from power. Heads I win, tails you lose.

If the inspectors fail to find anything, it means that there’s nothing there to find, or that they aren’t looking hard enough, so the inspections must continue for months, or years.

If the inspectors find something, it means that the “inspections process is working,” and so the inspections must continue, for months, or years.

It depends, of course, on continuing to misrepresent both the clear language of last October’s UN resolution, and the purpose of the inspectors. As Rumsfeld pointed out, they are inspectors, not “finders.” They are supposed to be inspecting and verifying weapons described and displayed by a cooperative Iraqi government (weapons, that is, that the Iraqi government declared in December didn’t exist). They are not supposed to be playing cat and mouse, and “catch me if you can.”

If it is their job to find weapons, in a country the size of Iraq, that the Iraqi government continues to try to hide, often in a shell game of moving them from one palace to another, they don’t have enough “inspectors” and even if they did, they will all be old and dead before the job is complete. They’ll never “eat at all the restaurants,” per my example above. Saddam will have ample time to develop not just nukes, but fusion weapons, and even photon torpedos and planet-busting death rays.

Purely and simply, “the inspections must go on” is the mantra of those who want Saddam to go on as well, because under such a scenario, short of natural causes, there will be no means to remove him, any more than there has been over the past decades.