The international community--disparaged as a "debating society" that simply wouldn't acknowledge that there must be WMD stockpiles currently in Iraq--was practically screaming, If you're going to war based on the WMD issue, you may be making a huge mistake--let the inspections finish.

But Bush refused. The administration declared the prior conclusions of the inspectors wrong and said waiting would just prove them wrong again. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration figures did not say that they weren't sure about the WMD issue and that an invasion was the only way to make a determination. They said they were sure about the WMD and they knew that the inspections were simply failing to find them.

Inspections. Now that this word has gone down the pro-war memory hole, it's as if the inspections were not aborted for the war. It's as if that wasn't the road not taken.

My guess is that pro-warriors fear to imagine a realistic alternate scenario to war. Given the conditions at the time Bush rushed into battle, what might have happened if we'd gone the other way? What if Hans Blix had come to a determination within weeks that there were no WMD in Iraq?

We'll never know.

But I don't think pro-warriors spend a lot of time thinking about it, because they'd have to admit that inspections were Issue #1 at the time Bush rushed into war, and they'd have to admit that, in all probability, the pro-warriors were just plain wrong about the futility of the inspections. They were probably working.

It probably is possible to use a coercive inspections process with international experts to determine whether a country has WMD or does not. It probably is possible to spend $200B of U.S. taxpayer dollars in a better way than an invasion and occupation that turns out to discover exactly what would have been discovered by an inspections process that cost only millions.

And it probably is possible, perhaps, to use that $200B in a way that reduces more overall suffering, including rectifying human-rights violations, than invading Iraq, slaughtering and maiming tens of thousands of people, enduring an insurgency fight that costs still more lives, and possibly abandoning Iraq to the same kind of chaos and violence that led to the leadership of Saddam Hussein.