The Redhunter

A majority of the member states thought he was right and had to admit that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake. It was scandalous that such a regime could for more than a decade have violated the spirit and the letter of the resolutions that had allowed a cease-fire after the liberation of Kuwait. The Security Council, including Syria, voted by nine votes to zero that Iraq must come into full compliance or face serious consequences.

Was it then correct to send military forces to the Gulf, in case Saddam continued his long policy of defiance, concealment, and expulsion or obstruction of U.N. inspectors?

If you understand the history of the inspection process at all, you must concede that Saddam would never have agreed to readmit the inspectors if coalition forces had not made their appearance on his borders and in the waters of the Gulf. It was never a choice between inspection and intervention: It was only the believable threat of an intervention that enabled even limited inspections to resume.
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Could Iraq have been believably "inspected" while the Baath Party remained in power?

No. The word inspector is misleading here. The small number of U.N. personnel were not supposed to comb the countryside. They were supposed to monitor the handover of the items on Iraq's list, to check them, and then to supervise their destruction. (If Iraq disposed of the items in any other way—by burying or destroying or neutralizing them, as now seems possible—that would have been an additional grave breach of the resolutions.) To call for serious and unimpeachable inspections was to call, in effect, for a change of regime in Iraq. Thus, we can now say that Iraq is in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty. Moreover, the subsequent hasty compliance of Col. Muammar Qaddafi's Libya and the examination of his WMD stockpile (which proved to be much larger and more sophisticated than had been thought) allowed us to trace the origin of much materiel to Pakistan and thus belatedly to shut down the A.Q. Khan secret black market.

Some people today have it in their heads that the role of the inspectors was to run around the country playing hide-and-seek with the Iraqis. Not the case. As Hitch says, their role was to verify the destruction of the material that Saddam declared following the Gulf War, not "comb the countryside" looking for weapons.

In 1987 the United States and USSR signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ("INF Treaty"). The US agreed to destroy our Pershing II and some of our GLCMs(Ground Launched Cruise Missile). The Soviets promised to destroy several types of their medium-range missiles, most notably the SS-20.

Inspectors of each country were sent to verify the destruction of the aformentioned systems. They watched while workers cut up the missiles with large saws and burned the fuel in special incinerators. What they did not do is run around the countryside in 4x4s on wild goose chases. Such a scenario would have been unimaginable. Why, then, do so many people seem to think that we should have done just that with Saddam for an indefinate period?

Hitch has a lot more to say, so go and read the whole thing.