After his bizarre interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos over the weekend, another possibility arises: Maybe he just doesn't have a clue. Maybe he really is out of his depth on this one, as he and his ministers have so often appeared to be. At any rate, it made for disturbing viewing. Mr. Chretien's aimless tacking about on the major issue of our time has long been a source of national shame. It is now also an embarrassment: not just indefensible but incoherent.

Quite what the show's American audience made of it all we can only guess. But I will not soon forget the look of incredulity on Condi Rice's face, as Mr. Chretien's interview concluded. Asked to respond, her expression migrated through several shades of amusement to something resembling pity. The war's over, and we won? Who is this guy?

Yet that is the position Mr. Chretien attempted to maintain. Even as his ambassador pushes a proposal threatening war if Saddam Hussein does not disarm by March 28, and days after his Foreign Affairs Minister had expressed support for a resolution setting a deadline of March 17, the Prime Minister as much as says the whole thing's a bluff. There's no need to go to war to disarm Saddam, because "the President has won." Indeed, not only is war unnecessary, but it seems so is disarmament.

With "troops at the door and inspectors on the ground," Saddam "cannot do anything anymore." He's "trapped," pinned down under heavy fire from Hans Blix's 3rd Light Inspectors. And certainly there is no need for anything drastic, like regime change.

So you see: The President has won. All he has to do is leave 250,000 troops camped out on the sands of Kuwait, indefinitely. Well, not quite indefinitely. After all, that's how we won the Cold War. And that only took, what, 45 years?

This is the approach Mr. Chretien recommends, what is sometimes called "containment." Accepting for about 30 seconds that Saddam is being contained even now, and leaving aside Mr. Chretien's revisionist history of the Cold War (it was won "without one tank, one missile and losing one life," if you don't count little things like Vietnam or Korea), the strategy can be sustained only by keeping the entire region perpetually on the brink of war.

As Mr. Chretien acknowledged at several points in the same interview, it is only because of the movement of hundreds of thousands of American troops to the region, a massive operation over several months, that we have even got this far: "Otherwise, probably nothing would have happened." Were they to go home, then, nothing much would happen, either.

Only the credible threat of war can induce Saddam to make the least concessions, including allowing inspections -- credible, and permanent.

So leave the troops there, to bake under the desert sun. If it costs the Americans hundreds of billions of dollars, that is a price Mr. Chretien is willing to pay.

But of course, it isn't just the enormous cost that makes this unthinkable. Is the Arab world likely to accept a permanent American armed presence of this size in the region? Are Americans?

For that matter, is Saddam? Is it in the nature of the man to submit to such a fate? Containment, after all, implies not only the perpetual threat of war but that Saddam reacts to this threat in a rational way. Yet as Mr. Chretien again acknowledges, Saddam "does not seem to be very rational." Indeed, "he's crazy." And what of the Iraqi people? Mr. Chretien is at least peripherally aware of Saddam's barbarity ("he's a terrible man and so on"). But does he also acknowledge the other half of any successful containment strategy: along with a permanent armed presence, permanent sanctions, with all the deprivation that entails? Once again, it seems, that is a price Mr. Chretien is willing to pay.

But then, at other times Mr. Chretien seems to reject his own strategy.

Is the Iraqi dictator no longer a threat? No, "Saddam has to disarm." Has he disarmed? No. "I don't know why he's not just, 'come on guys and look at this,' like it was done in South Africa." Have the inspectors succeeded in disarming him, or even accurately cataloguing the weapons in his arsenal? "We don't know exactly what's left." Are they making good progress? "I don't know why it's taking so much time." Is this position sustainable? "We cannot wait forever." So: Saddam's a crazy man who must be disarmed -- but that doesn't mean we should do anything to disarm him. Containment has not worked, is not working, and is not likely to work -- but neither is there any need to go to war. We cannot wait forever, but we can put off action indefinitely.

Because the President has won!