Lawrence F. Kaplan: “Bush gambled that inspections would make it easier to go to war. He gambled wrong.” The New Republic This is essentially an elaboration on the point I made here the other day — if we know better than the inspectors how much Iraq is supposedly concealing, then why insist on the inspection process. Bush is caught in a trap of his own devising. Actually, it may be symptomatic of the fundamental divisions inside the dysadministration between the more diplomatic and the more rabid.

So how does the administration get out of the inspections trap? One way would be to orchestrate an “Adlai Stevenson” moment in which the Bush team unveils a smoking gun– a la Stevenson’s presentation to the United Nations 40 years ago of photographs showing missiles in Cuba. The problem is, the administration has no smoking gun. What it has instead, according to senior administration officials, is a collection of guns that smell vaguely smoky, which a task force under deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley is busily sifting through–photographs of activity around suspected weapons sites, evidence of Iraqi attempts to conceal items before the arrival of weapons inspectors, and communications intercepts. Powell plans to present this evidence to the United Nations on February 5. But State Department and Pentagon officials remain far from certain that even a dramatic presentation will change many minds overseas, where any evidence that bolsters America’s case tends to be viewed as suspect.

Option number two is to hope that the French and others will abandon their opposition on the eve of war, when the prospect of an Iraq closed to French business looms more immediately. If even this fails to budge the Europeans, the argument goes, then surely images of liberated Iraqis rejoicing in the streets will. If all this seems like wishful thinking, well, this is where the inspections route has gotten the administration. Its members were right the first time around: The inspections process was bound to be a sham. But so was their effort to pretend it was anything else.