I didn’t get as skeptical a reaction as I expected to my prediction of no war with Iraq, but I thought I’d try and explain my reasoning a bit further anyway. The short route to war would arise if it could be proved that Iraq’s declaration on WMDs contained significant falsehoods. Obviously, this would be true if the declaration failed to account for stocks of germ and chemical weapons that have been found in previous rounds of inspections. But precisely because this is obvious, it was never likely that the Iraqi government would be so stupid. The table of contents of the declaration, available from the NYT as a PDF file includes a chapter of 22 pages headed “Unilateral destruction of chemical agents, weapons and precursors”.

A direct route to war would also arise if the US could prove that the Iraqis were lying, by pointing the inspectors to sites where weapons programs were underway. The dossiers that were being waved about a few months ago seemed to imply that the US Administration had direct evidence of particular sites being used for WMD production (remember all those grainy satellite photos). But now it appears that this was basically bluff. There could be a surprise in the next few days, but otherwise I think we have to conclude that the Administration doesn’t have the goods on Saddam

Several commentators have already raised the possibility that the US will invade Iraq anyway, either repudiating the UN resolutions or adopting some strained interpretation, such as attacks on planes enforcing the no-fly zone. The difficulty with this is the one that led Bush to go to the UN in the first place. No state in the region wants to be the springboard for an attack that will take place while inspectors are on the job in Iraq. Tony Blair might be willing, but he would almost certainly find it impossible to carry the British cabinet with him, and even Australia might refuse.

The best option for the US, on this analysis is to wait and see what the inspectors turn up. So far they’ve been tackling the obvious options, but with larger numbers they’ll be able to look harder. And some scientist may defect or leak a relevant secret. There was a report a week or so ago, that they’d found some shells with precursors for mustard gas that were supposed to have been destroyed, but nothing much has come of this as yet, and the coverage implied that this it an oversight rather than a carefully concealed weapons cache.

My guess, however, is that there may not be too much to leak. As far as I can tell, a nuclear weapons program can’t be hidden easily, and the last one was destroyed pretty thoroughly, so I’d guess that Iraq has given up on this line. As regards chemical and biological weapons, the rational thing for the Iraqi government would have been to destroy all the stocks, and have some trusted scientists memorise the recipes. It’s looking increasingly likely that this is what they’ve done. By contrast, the US Administration seems to have worked on the assumption that Saddam is crazy.

If my analysis is right, the rational policy on Iraq’s WMD programs from this point on is continued containment, keeping inspectors and monitoring equipment in place indefinitely. The other plausible case for war, based on liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam’s dictatorship, will have to wait for a more comprehensive approach to the Middle East including an imposed resolution to the Israel-Palestine problem.