France and Germany spent their weekend leaking a secret plan to force Iraq’s compliance with U.N. disarmament resolutions by doubling, even tripling, the number of weapons inspectors, perhaps even augmenting them with a thousand or so international military observers. The Bush administration spent its weekend angrily dismissing this ill-kept secret as just one more diversion, one more delay in dealing with Iraq’s long-standing intransigence and the United Nations’ creeping irrelevance.

Before the administration gets too exercised about just how much this plan misses the point – the inspectors are in Iraq, after all, to verify disarmament, not to play hide-and-seek – or about the underhandedness of two supposed allies, it should consider the plan’s logic. Even if inspectors never actually find the caches of banned weapons, the mobile labs, the forbidden rockets and the sheltered terrorists U.S. intelligence says are there, their presence in Iraq forces Saddam Hussein to hide his contraband, thwarting its further development and deployment. The sheer number of inspectors, if increased by the thousands, builds its own pressure on Iraq.

What France and Germany propose is nothing less than U.N. occupation of Iraq, an invasion through peaceful means. As troubling as that prospect is, it is preferable to war and the aftermath of war. At a time when the stature of the United Nations is very much in doubt, a successful united effort to hog-tie a madman would do much to restore faith in the rule of international law.

One problem with the proposal is its small size. Iraq is a large country, roughly the area of California. France and Germany concede that 100 U.N. inspectors – the initial deployment – or 250 inspectors – the full complement – cannot track down prohibited materials, but they offer no reason for anyone to believe that 300 or 750 would do any better. Clearly, if hide-and-seek is the game to be played, and every highway, rail line, airfield, factory and warehouse is in-bounds, a field of this size requires seekers in the thousands; for this California-sized undertaken, make that many thousands.

Not every seeker would need to be a scientist or engineer trained in detecting advanced weapons systems. Blue-helmeted U.N. troops could do much of the basic harassment and pestering, provided they are there in sufficient numbers.

The real problem, though, is getting Iraq to agree to this occupation. The two chief U.N. inspectors, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, reported this weekend they have been unable to get Iraq to agree to the top three items on their agenda for effective inspections; one is a safety guarantee from Iraq for reconnaissance aircraft to fly over the country. If Saddam Hussein will not promise not to shoot down aircraft overhead, what chance is there he will allow a peaceful invasion on the ground?

The plan offered by France and Germany might work, but only if it is carried out on a scale far larger than they suggest. From the disarmament resolutions immediately after the Gulf War to Resolution 1441 of last November, Iraq has systematically subverted every attempt at enforcement; each time, the United Nations has been faced with the difficult question of what next. This time, if Iraq does not agree to an occupying army of scientists, technologists and peacekeepers, it will be a question for France and Germany to answer.