MATT WELCH IS WRONG

I like Matt Welch. I read him when I can--he's funny and sharp and nice to people he thinks are silly and wrong (unlike most bloggers, including me a good part of the time). But he's dangerously wrong in this post, which I've just found.

Oh, he's probably right on the Walter Mead Russell stuff. I wouldn't trust UNICEF's numbers on anything or for anything. UNICEF is just a creature of those first two letters in its name, and as such is every bit as trustworthy as the most malignant member of the group it serves (a position currently held by France, but will soon rotate to Iran or Syria or some other sinkhole). Here's where Matt misses the facts. In describing Saddam Hussein, Matt says

He is a broke and isolated and desperate totalitarian.

Saddam Hussein is none of those three things. He is not broke--he's been able to finagle the oil-for-weapons of mass destruction-food game to the point where he's selling scads of oil, almost as much as he could pump before the Gulf War. He is not isolated. Sure, the Kuwaitis don't like him, but he objectively has France very much in his corner. How about China? The Red Chinese have been selling Saddam rocket fuel and fibre-optics enabled radar systems and who knows what else. He's also got Russia and Germany going to bat for him, and even Russians volunteering to go to Iraq to fight against us. And he has a global network of agitators trying to slam the brakes on disarmament in any form. He isn't well liked, but that's not the same thing as being isolated. Heck, Kim Jong Il offered him a Kato Keilin-style deal if things get too hot in Baghdad. As for desperate, not from where I'm sitting. He's trying to move as fast as he can to keep ahead of the inspectors and to get his nukes online and to set traps for our troops should we actually invade, but he ain't desperate, at least not yet. Every day he acts a little more comfortable with the way things are going. When he let those human shields leave instead of forcing them to stay on and cover his assets on his terms, he did not act like a desperate man. He doesn't think we'll invade--he thinks France will win in the end. And he may be right.

Saddam is a totalitarian, though, so I'll give Matt half a point there.

Of course, all of the above points to the impotence of "containment." Saddam Hussein has been in a box for a dozen years. Yet he's still there, still building illegal stuff, and still able to marshall enough of an alliance at the UN to keep justice at bay. Try and contain him another year or two, and pretty soon he'll be kicking the inspectors out again and trying to get the sanctions lifted again (without complying with the legalese that left him in power in the first place) and the Iraqi children will just keep dying in whatever numbers we all can agree is the truth.