Not paradoxes Sailer has a recent post in which he outlines three paradoxes of the war debate as he sees them.

- The Armchair Warriors say, "Saddam and his mighty war machine are an imminent threat to conquer the Gulf States or even Israel, but his pathetic army would be a pushover if we invaded." The Armchair Worriers say, "Saddam's is far too weak to threaten anybody, but his mighty war machine would do fearsome damage to us if we tried to conquer him." - The Armchair Warriors say Saddam has fearsome chemical and biological weapons and the requisite delivery systems, but we shouldn't have any trouble talking his neighbors into letting us stage our armies on their soil, even though that exposes them to pre-emptive attack. The Armchair Worriers say the opposite. - The Armchair Warriors say that Saddam is a major threat to use his supposed superweapons in unprovoked, out-of-the-blue attacks on other countries, but not to use them to defend his own country from invasion. The Armchair Worriers say the opposite

In turn:

• No reasonable hawk thinks that Saddam could conquer Israel. He wouldn't get far into Saudi Arabia either without hitting US troops. His army is the strongest in the region after Israel's, but it's a distant second, and he's absolutely no match for US forces. Furthermore, hawks believe that Saddam's aggression will only start up again when he has a credible deterrent against US attack, namely nuclear weapons. His "war machine" is not the issue at all.
• Saddam's neighbors are between a rock and a hard place, but they're smart enough to go with the eventual winner. They figure that Saddam will have his hands full with the US military, and what free time he has will be spent launching missiles at Israel.
• The bio and chem weapons are not the real threat, because they don't rapidly cause huge casualties. Chem weapons are decent for battlefield use, but bioweapons are much more of a terror instrument. Furthermore, I'd much rather have him employ chem weapons against trained and prepared soldiers than against civilians. Nukes are the real threat, and Saddam doesn't have them yet. If he did, we wouldn't be having this discussion - there would be no invasion of Iraq if it had nuclear weapons.

That last point is one of the reasons we have to take him out. If Saddam was allowed to acquire a weapon, every two bit dictator would see its magical effects as a deterrent. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry would scramble for a nuke which would let them offset the USA's massive conventional arms advantage. To say the least, such a situation is undesirable. On the other hand, if we do take out Hussein, the incentive structure utterly changes. Suddenly those two bit regimes are faced with a nonproliferation doctrine with teeth - the only kind that works. Dictators understand force, and they'll understand that the US will stomp them if they even think about pursuing nukes... Update: Note: Unlike the realist deterrence model, we don't have to trust the dictators to be rational. For the policy to be a credible deterrent, we must squash dictatorships if they're trying to get nukes, and help them liberalize if they renounce their nuclear ambitions. If they become liberal democracies, they can eventually be trusted with nukes. But until then, the rational ones will be dissuaded by our policy, and the irrational ones will be crushed preemptively. Update 2: Some in the comments section didn't see that I left room for rational dictatorships to hold on to nukes. That's our judgment call - are they rational in the sense that they aren't going to make self-destructive decisions? Meaning, is there a low probability of them actually using the nukes? Yes, yes, it's "imperialist","patronizing", etc., but that's of no concern to me. The question is, is it effective? Well, it's certainly no less effective than what we're doing now. We have only the carrot of abiding by the NPT treaty, and no stick to back up violations. Once they get nukes, we can't intervene unless the urgency is great enough to permit nuclear-scale losses.