You ain't just whistling dixie there, pardner. That oughta be a clue-by-four right on the noggin. For such a varied and onery group as the American people to have an overwhelming consenus, the issue must be fairly cut and dry. Through careful diplomacy, he can probably also gain at least the acquiescence — if not the active support — of a number of European and Arab allies.

Who cares? We can do it alone if need be. A military operation to remove Mr. Hussein, however, would be the most momentous use of force by the United States since the Vietnam War.

I would say that the decades-long deployment of the US military throughout the world, compleat with nuclear missile subs with enough firepower to knock civilisation back into the Stone Age, to counter the Warsaw Pact, was the most momentous use of force since the Vietnam War. What difference does that make anyway? Your point? If President Bush undertakes such a mission, it will dominate the remainder of his term,

As any world-shaping event would. Hello? Truman? Marshall Plan? radically reshape the politics of the Persian Gulf and Middle East,

And that would be a Bad Thing? and have major repercussions for the global economy.

All of them good, I suspect, unless you think Saudi-style petro-blackmail is a Good Thing. Yet there has been little debate about the pros and cons of such a war.

Maybe because there is so little ambiguity, to a reasonable man. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings planned for next week will be a start, but only a start.

That's what we need, is more freakin' talk about Saddam. Let's limit the agenda to anything anyone has to say that is new information. Then it oughta take about five minutes.

Hey, I've an idea, let's send in the UN! Oh yeah, we did that. The track record suggests that the United States can continue to contain Saddam Hussein without war, just as we deterred the Soviets during the Cold War and just as we have contained North Korea for half a century.

UmmHmm. No doubt the peace at any price crowd would be shaking with fits that could be recorded on seismographs in China, were some poor Al Qaida detainee be wrongly treated in Guantanamo, but are willing to let the entire Iraqi nation, some 20 million strong, be effectively emprisoned, tortured, gassed, and repressed until Saddam dies a natural death. Mr. Hussein values his hold on power and his life more than anything and has refrained from actions likely to lead to his downfall.

Yeahright. Remember Kuwait? 'Bout ten years ago? You think that was a move likely to get Lloyd's to lower his life insurance premiums? Who'da thunk Bush 41 woulda let Powell talk him out of ending two days too soon? Yet there is a serious case for overthrowing him if he continues to hide his weapons of mass destruction and deny access to United Nations inspectors.

No screamin' eagle shit. We can agree on at least one thing. Although he appears not to have been implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks, he could decide to give biological arms to Al Qaeda in the future.

Correct. He may also be gradually progressing toward a nuclear weapons capability.

Per the UN report, ICBMs by 2015. Maybe we oughta wait 'til he has a few, whattya think? That way, the times will be able to publish an op-ed piece saying that we can't attack him because he's got NYC hostage. Right now, he's only got the populace of Baghdad to use against us. But the case for overthrow needs to be compared with the costs and risks of an invasion of Iraq.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, most advocates of overthrowing the Iraqi regime have tended to minimize the attendant costs. For them, the rapid fall of the Taliban seemed to mark the arrival of a new form of warfare requiring only small numbers of American ground forces and promising decisive results at little cost. But there are ample grounds for thinking that war against Iraq would be much tougher.

As I said just a few days ago. In Afghanistan, the Taliban fought from fixed trench lines outside of cities. Similarly, during Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, Iraqi forces fought us in the open desert and could not counter American airpower. In a future war, however, Iraqi forces would probably take a lesson from their defeat in 1991 and fight from the cities, where civilian casualties would greatly raise the cost of air strikes and buildings would provide disguise for weaponry and military personnel.

I'm wondering if they've been reading me. Probably not. Saddam's only possible way to even delay our victory is painfully obvious to any informed thinker, and the Big Brains at the Brookings Institute don't use former Marine NCOs as references. Maybe they should. While many of Iraq's 425,000 active-duty troops are poorly trained and their loyalty to Mr. Hussein is questionable, his top 100,000 troops — especially the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard — are unlikely to crack quickly.

So, we agree that three-fourths of his troops will surrender the first chance they get. The balance will be tougher nuts to crack, to be sure, but I think they can be gotten to.

You see, one of the major flaws of our strategy in GWI was for Bush41 to repeatedly state that our war aims were simply to liberate Kuwait, and not aimed at replacing Saddam. Bush41 stubbornly clung to this line, even after Saddam performed acts that would have justified an expansion of the war's objectives. The firing of the oil fields of Kuwait, and the release of crude into the Persian Gulf, were blatant, intentional acts of eco-terrorism, for which we could have reasonably sought his head.

So, Saddam's crack troops could reasonably expect to be around and in power at the end of GWI. We must make it very clear in our formal declaration of war, and I hope there is one, that Saddam and his henchmen are exactly who and what we are after this time.

Furthermore, Bush43 should get on CNN immediately before the dance begins, and state in clear, uncompromising terms, that any Iraqi military or security troops that engage in using civilians as shields, attacking anyone with chemical or bio weapons, or dirty bombs, will, after our inevitable victory, be hunted down, tried by a military tribunal, and hung by the neck until they are quite dead. This will apply from Saddam on down the chain of command to the poor grunt that yanks the lanyard at the artillery battery.

Whether or not this will actually work, I am not bold enough to predict, but it remains our best course of action. They fear retribution from Mr. Hussein or from a new regime in Iraq made up of their internal enemies more than they fear the weak Iraqi opposition and American airpower.

Then we must attempt to make them fear us more. See above. We should also emphasize that the US has always been, after the cessation of hostilities, genrous to the defeated. The stick AND the carrot. Psyops are our friend. One of the first bombing missions over the city of Baghdad should be well-written leaflets to this end. If there is any real hope of their deserting Mr. Hussein and handing us a victory without a fight, it will probably require the deployment of a large American invasion force on Iraq's border.

It's standard military practice to use overwhelming force whenever possible. Let's chunk this half-baked special forces combined with rebels plan right now, and load up the Big Battalions. If we had to fight the Republican Guard in Baghdad, the urban combat could resemble that in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 — not to mention Israel's reoccupation of parts of the West Bank this year. Small arms fired from close range would put American aircraft and troops at much greater risk than they were in Desert Storm or the Kosovo and Afghanistan wars.

I agree. We are not going to get off as easily as the last time, unless our psyops folks can get inside their heads. Iraq might use chemical or biological agents against our invading forces.

He almost certainly will. They will only serve to slow us down, without significant casualties. American military casualties could number into the thousands.

Most likely, I'm afraid. I doubt we thought the Normandy landings were going to be bloodless, but we did know that they were necessary.

Tell you what let's do. let's poll the military, the folks that are gonna be the ones dying, and ask them if they wanna go do it. If we don't get a two-thirds supermajority, then we don't go in. Wanna lay odds how that vote'll turn out? Mr. Hussein may well fire Scud missiles carrying chemical or biological warheads against Israel, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia — or may gas Iraqis who rise against him, as he did in 1988.

He will do all of the above. Even with these factors, American forces would still win such a war and be able to install a new government. But the price would be substantial in Iraqi and American lives.

This is a war, you know. According to a leaked Pentagon war plan, the operation could require 250,000 American troops invading Iraq from multiple directions. Deploying smaller forces would be to hope for victory rather than to ensure it. After the war, stability and democracy in Iraq would be far from guaranteed, and we might need to occupy Iraq for a decade or more.

Let's see, WWII ended in 1945, and we still have troops over there. I presume that operation was a failure, also. The point is? There is a case to be made that these costs are worth sustaining. But if so, we need Mr. Bush to make it. He has not yet done so.

There cetainly is a case. A free and independent Iraq means the death of the Islamicist movement worldwide. It means that Iran will surely follow. Those two nations are the key to a resurgence of the Islamic world, and to it's return to modernity. With those as an anchor of democracy in the Middle East, the other corrupt and backward oil theocracies will wither away into insignificance, and a great wave of political and personal freedom will wash over the planet.

We may lose thousands, even tens of thousands, but in the end, to mangle Henry V around a bit, when we "put forth a rightful hand in a well-hallow'd cause" it will be a gesture that will make "many laugh more than ever did weep at it."