What else makes sense?
For anthrax, post-attack treatment is the only viable option for the general public. Consider that, in the event of a major dispersal on the NYC subway, 4 million people would immediately be at risk of dying if they did not get treatment within 24 hours. Not a pretty picture is it?
The government just awarded a contract for a new "morning after" anthrax vaccine, which comes with an order for 25 million doses, enough to treat 8 million people. In the interim, the Pentagon's stocks have been diverted for civilian use, but the amount of vaccine is too small to handle even a single attack on the New York subway (say one sleeper agent tossing a few brown bags of the "Daschle" anthrax on the subway tracks round midnight). The are also big safety and efficacy questions surrounding the existing vaccine. The new vaccine should be through safety trials by the end of next year, if everything goes according to plan. The parallel effort to put in place a mass post-attack dissemination infrastructure, using the remote threat of a smalpox attack as a comfortingly hypothetical pretext, may mean that we have the civil defense framework in place about the same time frame. My guess is that any final showdown with Saddam will be delayed until about six months before the presidential election, based on these rate-limiting factors. There are plenty of things we can do, militarily and non-militarily, to keep the pressure up and kill the intervening time, before we push Saddam's back to the wall.