Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal envisions a world still blighted by the presence of Saddam Hussein:
Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi's thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West's efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?
There are two possible scenarios to weigh and I can’t tell which is worse.
The first is that Saddam would have redoubled his efforts to reconstitute his own nuclear program either by cutting a deal with North Korea or A.Q. Khan (which all evidence shows he was trying to do anyway) but with new assistance. Arab regimes now quietly entreating the United States and Israel to take care of the mullahs’s atomic ambitions for them would likely hedge their bets by helping out the one Sunni brethren who stood the best chance of becoming a "deterrent." For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the unpredictable adventurist of yesterday would suddenly appear a reliable countermeasure against Shiite predominance tomorrow.
The second grim outcome to contemplate is that Saddam might have once again become a military ally of the United States, providing us with intelligence on Tehran in exchange for a loosening of sanctions or some other material douceur to keep his dictatorship afloat. If you think such an arrangement impossible after the first Gulf War, the Anfal campaign and the No-Fly zones, you’d do well to remember the arguments that were in fact trotted out against removing Saddam from power in 2002. Mainstream war opponents took for granted that he was indeed seeking the bomb and yet they believed he was containable. Well, it's fairly easy to see the progression of this logic in light of a mounting Iranian threat: "realists" of both a right and left coloring would now make the case that only by soliciting the Baathist’s aid on this key national security challenge could we truly be able to cool his lust for a nuke of his own.
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