Is it inevitable?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 18, 2003

Well, Dom, I'd accept your point--if it's inevitable the Saddam would eventually use WMDs. But the President says, pretty clearly, that it isn't.

Maybe I'm reading too much into that phrase. At other times, the Bush Administration has said that it's only a matter of time...

But do we know for sure that Saddam plans to use these weapons against us-- sooner or later, directly or through proxies? I can't answer that question. President Bush can. And a lot hangs on the answer.

(BTW: Back in 1983, in preliminary discussions of their "pastoral letter" on nuclear weapons, many US bishops made intemperate criticisms of deterrence; the Vatican and European bishops actually intervened to make sure that the final document did not say that nuclear deterrence was inherently immoral.)