[deccan]

Originally posted by primitive:
GW:
The Iraq war was an impressive display of military might, but we already knew from GW1, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan what the US forces was capable of. As a display of political power, so far the war (and the peace) has been a disaster, as it only have shown that the US is willing to face an opponent who can't retaliate. North Korea now knows that it will only need the capability to kill something like 10-15 000 American soldiers in a war to make it politically impossible for the US to invade. Somehow I believe the world would have been better of if they didn’t know that.

Your argument is specious, I must say.

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was necessary to make any rational person believe that someone would "only need the capability to kill something like 10-15 000 American soldiers in a war to make it politically impossible for the US to invade", at least in circumstances that were not an imminent and clear danger to American lives. Somalia alone was enough, if an example were needed, which I don't believe to be the case.

For that matter, saying that the U.S. tries its best to limit itself to wars that it can win with the least amount of casualties and losses to itself is a statement of the obvious that is true for anyone, even SEIV games.

A better, sounder argument would be the one made against Tony Blair: the U.S. government did know that Iraq did not have WMDs immediately prior to the war, but either closed its eyes to that knowledge or even deliberately "sexed up" arguments that Iraq did have WMDs in order to justify a war that it had already decided, for whatever reasons of its own, that it wanted to have.

But the Hutton inquiry in the U.K. has pretty convincingly shown that the Blair government did strongly and honestly believe that Iraq did have WDMs. If so, the spooks messed up big time and should be heavily swatted for that, but this wouldn't be the first time that they'd messed up and this kind of error is entirely different from your implication that they deliberately went to war even while knowing that Iraq did not have WDMs.

As for the lessons drawn by would-be owners of WDMs, I would argue that they should draw conclusions opposite to what you say. Submit to intrusive inspections and comply fully and unreservedly with U.N. and IAEA directives or you WILL be smacked down regardless of whether or not you actually own WDMs.