Sure. Loads of money and lives could also have been saved by not going in after Iraq invaded Kuwait, too. And Saddam would now be sitting on a nuclear arsenal. But that's another story.

So we leave Saddam in there, and hope to God the U.N. does a better job of detection and than it did in pre-Gulf-War Iraq, or Libya. Pakistan was running a goddam nuke ring under the U.N.'s nose. And then what happens ten years from now? One would think we'd learned our lesson by leaving Saddam alone after the Gulf War, per the wishes of our allies and the U.N., and hoping he'd just go away.

Take him off the board now, or be forced to take him off later. It's still money and lives. Bush has taken the heat to remove a tyranny central to Arab radicalism, and will probably get no more credit for it in the future than Reagan is getting for ending the Cold War.