Inspections.

At the risk of making pro-warriors uncomfortable by mentioning a word they once loved to discuss but now treat as forbidden, I would point out that the inspections that were being conducted under the auspices of the U.N. before the Iraq war did not result in tens of thousands of casualties and the destruction of much of Iraq's infrastructure. Also they didn't cost $200 billion. Also they were working.

Yet pro-warriors often act as if military action were a choice thrust upon us. As if there weren't a clear alternate choice at the time President Bush chose war: Allow the inspections to finish. As if the consensus of the experts in the field was not that the inspections could come to a determination on the factual matter of Saddam's possession of WMD.

It is possible to imagine how the pro-war side could have been right and the anti-war "appeasers" wrong. If the inspections that were under way at the time Bush rushed into war had a) Run their course to the satisfaction of the international experts, and b) Also failed to discover actual WMD that they should have discovered, then the argument for military action over inspections would be persuasive today.

But that's not what happened.

The pro-war side finds it convenient to forget that they were arguing that the international team of experts assigned by the U.N. to determine if Iraq had WMD were incompetent and had no hope of finding the WMD that were surely in Iraq. Many pro-warriors went so far as to accuse Hans Blix of being corrupt and actively hiding evidence that Saddam had WMD. Just wait until the U.S. gets in and occupies Iraq, the pro-war side said, then you'll see how useless these inspections were.

In September 2002, Donald Rumsfeld flatly stated that Saddam "has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons." Just before the war, he stated, "We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

This was the case that got us into the war: Saddam has known stockpiles of WMD and the inspections are useless for finding them. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," Rumsfeld said of the inspections.

Yet, today, in the absence of the promised discoveries, the pro-war side proceeds as if the key question at the start of the war wasn't whether the inspections were working. Many pro-warriors here at Blogcritics ridiculed those who said that we should rely on inspections to determine the WMD issue.