How else do you defang him?

The most reasonable alternative here is to make a deal at the very last moment, when there is obviously no alternative for Iraq, when there is no more hope in diplomacy for Saddam Hussein. Right now there's plenty of hope for Hussein, because you don't yet have the Germans, you don't yet have the French, you don't yet have the Security Council. So you can't make the deal now. But at the very end, when you've dealt with all of that, or when you've said you're going to do it without them, when it's absolutely clear to Saddam Hussein, that's when you send the Arabs to Hussein to say, here's your choice: Leave, with a little money, with your family, with your life, do an Idi Amin, do what some of the other dictators did -- or die. Because if the war starts, [the U.S.] is going to drop a bomb on your head, or you'll be assassinated, or they'll catch you eventually, prosecute you and execute you.

Now, unless you're a religious zealot -- which Saddam is not, he's secular -- unless you want to give up your life, and I see no evidence of that, you'll make this deal. And at that point, I think he does make a deal.

The quick, glib response to that always is, "Oh, but he's crazy." What does that mean? That means he's going to commit suicide? I don't think so. So as far as I'm concerned, this isn't complicated. And if I'm wrong, and it doesn't come out that way, well, so be it, but you're certainly not yet at a point where you can say there is no reasonable alternative to war.

You can say he's lying, you've caught him, he's cheated ... though frankly I don't see a strong case for he poisoned his own people, I think they've got their history a little mucked up there. But let's say he's capable of that.

But again the cost of a war ... we're not talking enough about the aftermath. This is very much like cancer, except a really perverse kind of cancer. Saddam Hussein, Osama, al-Qaida, all these groups are malignant tumors, they're lethal, they can kill. So you have to extirpate them. You have to operate on the country and cut that tumor out. But once you do, the result is that the cancer that produced them produces even more tumors, faster, because that's the nature of this terrorism, that's the nature of their hostility.

That's what Sharon's running into in Palestine: You kill a terrorist and he produces three or four others -- just out of anger and hostility and a willingness to give up their lives.

So it's not enough to have a war that kills a lot of innocent people, and maybe gets Saddam Hussein too. You've got to cure the cancer that produced that tumor, and a war doesn't do that. It only makes it worse.

And so you should be thinking about what caused the hostility. Bush himself has said -- if you look at his defense strategy in September that called for preemption -- he has said, Look, when you're repressed, when you're poor, when you're undereducated, when you don't have opportunity, when you have all of those frustrations, it leads to hostility and it's a breeding ground for terrorists, just the way ghettos in the city of New York or anywhere in the U.S. that has that kind of syndrome produce crime. Therefore you have to work on that.

In my book "Reason to Believe," I talk about drug addiction and the analogy is very good. You think about kids going to the outskirts of the village on the weekend drinking from the poisoned lake, just a drug-ridden lake, and coming back and creating all the mayhem that you will when you're drugged up. And you lock those kids up or you beat them up or you inoculate them. But until you dry up that lake you're not going to stop the mayhem, and that's what this is. You've got to get to the source. And a war won't do that. A war will only provoke more violence.

How do you get to the source?

If repression, ignorance, madrassas that teach you a distorted version of Islam that produces hate and a desire to kill infidels -- if those are the causes, and they are, then you have to change those conditions. You have to go to the Arabs, especially your allies the Saudi Arabians who are paying for some of those madrassas, you have to say: Stop that, that's a provocation, stop teaching that in the schools.

You have to get together with your allies in the Western world and Saudi Arabians and other allies who have some wealth in the Arab world, and you have to go and help them with their economic development, help them with their education.

Look, after WWII, after the Holocaust, we went back to Europe and spent billions of dollars in the Marshall Plan to bring Germany back to life, to bring Italy back to life. We went to Japan after we defeated them, after they killed our men and women, and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Japan. Why? Because you wanted to dry up the things that might create chaos, continuing hostility -- and incidentally, because you wanted to create a trading partner. You wanted to make of them an asset to the world.

It's the same here. You have to invest in them not because you love them -- which would be a nice reason to do it, but it's too much to ask for, I've discovered -- but because pragmatically it's the only way to work. We're interconnected. We're interdependent. If they're miserable, unhappy, jealous, misguided, they're going to hurt you. So you go and you change that. And you do it with money and investment and understanding. Is it expensive? Of course it is! But not as expensive as a war, especially in the era of nuclear weapons.

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