To listen to some people talk, you'd think we could hatch trained soldiers like Warrior Bugs.

The options we had:

- Call the whole thing off. Bring the troops home for good, and keep up the sanction/no-fly/fake inspection charade for the next ten years. I doubt the inspection process would survive the removal of U.S. armed forces.

- Decide an invasion is inevitable at some point, but give Saddam a few more years to allow us to build up to pre-Clinton military levels. Hope Saddam is going to be twiddling his thumbs that whole time.

Given that, we could either keep thousands of troops and weapons parked around Iraq all that time to make sure the U.N. still has access, or bring them all home for two years. You can guess what would happen to the inspection process. Saddam would have two years to do pretty much anything he wants.

- Invade with what we had, and do the best we could while developing tactics and capacity in real time.

You can make arguments for all of these, I suppose. But all of them have consequences of their own.