Saddam Hussein said on Sunday that he will continue to dismantle his stock of Al-Samoud missiles (which, by the way, he once claimed didn't exist), but only if the United States continues to act with the support of the United Nations.
The message from Iraq is clear: "We're only being the reasonable little rogue nation that we are and complying with international law. We're not doing this out of fear of you, United States!"
I'd like to try and be stupid enough to believe that, but I really don't fancy hitting myself on the head that many times.
My dad used to have a saying: "If it's raining while the sun is out, that means the devil is beating his wife." Since I'm still struggling to work out the meaning of this phrase, allow me to borrow a second saying from my dad: "Money talks and bull$#!+ walks" - an old poker saying with a much more practical application.
We have been playing nicely with Saddam, more or less, since the end of the Gulf War. Inspectors didn't work back in the '90s; they just hung around Iraq for seven years until Saddam kicked them out (curious), and then we tried sanctions after that. Sanctions didn't work either.
But what has worked? Well, for the past year or so, President Bush has been engaged in what a lot of critics are calling "saber-rattling," which I think is a nice way of saying "swinging the big brass balls of the United States Armed Forces in Hussein's ugly tyrannical mug."
Critics scoff, "This George W. Bush - what a cowboy! What an arrogant fool!" But, strangely enough, ever since Bush started rattling his saber, things started happening. Iraq let inspectors back in and started to dismantle their ballistic missiles.
Is this a complete success? Of course not; but it is a start. And it is definitely more of an accomplishment than 10 years of bending over and being polite ever produced.
Hussein knows that Bush means business, and he is reacting accordingly. Hussein's current course of action may or may not eliminate the necessity of war, but what it does prove is that our president - gasp - actually knows what he's doing.
In the best-case scenario, Saddam Hussein will disarm completely and give an invasion-level force of inspectors free reign of Iraq to verify the disarmament, then he and everyone in his regime will retire peacefully out in the hills.
We will set up a democratic government in Iraq, its success will become a shining beacon to the rest of the Middle East, and no one will have to die. Plus, I'll be married to Eliza Dushku.
Unlikely, but just in case anything remotely like that happens, I'd like to go on record right now as saying that it's exactly what President Bush, myself, and more or less every "Iraq-hawk" is hoping for right now.
I need to go on the record as saying that, because if/when it does happen, liberals will take to the airwaves and scream to the heavens about how their glorious dream of "victory without war" has become a reality, despite all Bush's plans. They'll say inspections worked, not saber rattling. Peace, not violence.
Hmm. A Republican president engineers the fall of a tyrannical regime without firing a single shot (but never being afraid to do what was necessary) and liberals fail to give him his credit once he achieves victory. I think I remember something like that happening in recent history... what was that guy's name?
Ah, yes. Ronald Reagan.
Eric Spratling is a journalism junior. Reach him at ericspratling@cox.net.
