Are you talking about the CIA extradition program or Saddam.

We have abused thousnad of peoples rights during this process.

We are no better

The weapons his father sold him were used already.

When you create a special arm to create and pump the hype you are the one guilty.

They had a special office putting together intelligence.
The same people who wanted change in Iraq forever.
So what do you think the reuslt of their gathering would be.

The tactical problem with going into Iraq was that we were not done in Afghanastan. Saddam wasnt going anywhere.

And on top of that we rushed to war.

We kicked the inspectors out. There was no need to rush.
Bush sped up his attqack because people were starting to question the evidence.

That was the reason we rushed. It did not have to happen.

We were lied to and rushed to war when the evididence started falling apart. Colins powell at the UN was a disater.

If it was agreed upon that the evidence was correct why did the UN not go in with us. Its simple. They were lying.

Remeber Coalition of the Willing. Please.

My previous post is addressed to Deb. So are all posts which make any reference to stories about people being eaten by lions or references to “Chief Wiggles.” Cal, I think that you thought that one of my posts to Deb was addressed to you. My fault.

Compared to the 300,000 to 500,000 that Saddam killed during his regime?

“We could have threatened to reduce our oil imports from them unless Saddam changed his ways.”

Yes I’m sure this would make a big difference since you had France, Russia and China being bribed with kickbacks and oil to vote against anything that the US put forth in the UN. They were also actively trying to lift the sanctions against Saddam. At which point we wouldn’t have had any weapons inspectors inside Iraq. During the time that we did have weapons inspectors, Saddam played games with them constantly. Considering that a ‘year’ passed by while trying to get the UN to enforce it’s resolutions (with a promised vote of NO by France and Russia) we still don’t know what type of weapons Saddam had.

“We could have demanded that human rights inspectors be given access. ”

Certainly, especially since they did such a bang-up job of protecting the 300,000 bodies in the many mass graves!

“We could have sent food and medicine to help prevent unnecessary deaths. We could have raised it as an issue at all, but we didn’t.”

That is exactly what the oil-for-food program was about…. It wasn’t working very well was it? How much longer should that have gone on??? Since Saddam was getting his way with France, Russia and China’s support, paid with the money from this very program…. this should tell you that the most important thing on Saddam’s mind was to be able to reconstitute his weapons program… that is why he was paying so much in bribes for votes in the UN to have the sanctions lifted!!!

“Get real? Stop acting like people aren’t getting tortured and killed right now, and then tell me to get real. And especially stop talking about people getting fed to tigers. ”

I couldn’t remember if it was lions or tigers, apparently it was lions….

“We also went over to what was Kusai’s Palace where he kept his lions. On the grounds of the palace there is a cage, back where the large Jacuzzi is, where there is a lion, two lionesses, and their 6 cubs. Knowing that the adult lions had been fed humans in the past, we decided not to get too close to them, opting to play with the cubs instead, who licked our fingers through the chain link fence. ”
source: http://chiefwiggles.blogspot.com/

We tried that for years. Until the Oil-for-Food program that was intended to make the lives of ordinary Iraqis better… and if you’ve been reading the news lately, you know how that turned out.

“We could have demanded that human rights inspectors be given access. We could have sent food and medicine to help prevent unnecessary deaths. We could have raised it as an issue at all, but we didn’t.”

Have you been paying attention to the Oil-for-Food scandal at all? Especially today’s revelations? Billions in kickbacks to thousands of companies all over the world (even here in the US). All the money that was supposed to go for that food and medecine instead went for kickbacks and massive palaces.

Do you really think that Saddam would have changed his ways because of a Stern Talking To, when it’s very clear he had the UN in his back pocket?

I don’t like the fact that we went to war. But I’m finished with the could’ves and should’ves. At this point we must give the Iraqis a chance at a better life that they would not have had under Saddam.

Who’s “we?” You and George Galloway? You and Jacques Chirac?

“Saddam changed his ways?” Who needs to get real here?

Quotation marks around words I never wrote.

Thjis conversation is officially at an and. Slime away, bro. I’ve tuned you out.

I don’t expect you to accept this answer, but it is nonetheless an honest one. You ask why war is a possible path to social change, and I’ll tell you why, in some situations, I think it is — though it always is a tragedy.

If you look at it historically, going to war seems like going down a rat hole. You go in one place, and no matter what you intend, you always come out somewhere else.

A quibble with the Mother Country over a petty tax of three pence a pound on tea becomes the birth of a nation. A boundary dispute with Mexico over a few square miles of Texas scrub becomes a land-grab of a third of a continent and keeps the valuable port of San Francisco from defaulting to British hands. A dispute with Germany over unrestricted submarine warfare and spies in Mexico becomes “making the world safe for democracy.”

But in each case, the goals got bigger, and broader. Sometimes it was military necessity that forced the American leaders to take the higher ground — Lincoln and Wilson. Nonetheless, once they were driven up to it, they made a stand for it, imperfectly.

It’s also true that the shock of a war can unleash pent up forces in a society. As it has in Iraq, and, in ripples, across the Islamic world. Some of them very destructive, but some of them potentially great.

To shift metaphors, going to war is like the break shot that opens a pool game. You can;t entirely predict the outcome, but some vectors are predictable.

This also, incidentally, is one reason I care very little why George W. Bush went to war. I am sure his mix of motives was different than mine, and included some unsavory elements. But once the battles begin, it’s out of his hands, too. He’s as much forced by circumstances as any of the rest of us. And if it drives him out of selfish isolationism and towards nation-building and democracy promotion, I say great!

What seems, after the fact, to be the great justification for a war turns out to be something that did not figure among the stated reasons for starting it. Study World War II today and you’ll get a big unit on the Holocaust. How odd, then, to discover it played no part in the justification for the war at the time. Lincoln freed the slaves. But the American Civil War began as an constitutional chess match and an attempt to enforce U.S. authority in certain forts and arsenals, and to collect the tariff in Southern ports. Lincoln publicly disavowed any intention to free a single slave.

Now of course, all these ultimate outcomes were in the minds of somebody somewhere at the time the wars began. There are some crafty pool players out there. Many abolitionists, even among the pacifist Quakers, let Lincoln go on with his rhetoric about not wanting to free blacks and intending to protect slavery where it existed. They understood — and I have read their letters — that once the tug of war began, the only way out for the administration was to end slavery and subvert the South by stealing its labor force.

Certainly, too, the more radical American revolutionaries were angling for independence from the first bullet. But to draw the bulk of the country they needed to hold John Dickinson and the other moderates on the platform by making a general appeal to the rights of British citizens (as most Americans still felt themselves to be).

It’s an awful risk, and a terrible price to pay, whether it turns out well or not. It ought to be a tool of last resort, a crappy choice among crappier alternatives. You can argue whether the U.N. options had been exhausted with reference to Iraq in 2003 (though, for me, that was decided when the French rejected an American compromise proposal before Saddam did, and has been bolstered by subsequent oil-for-food revelations).

You may call that a hideous sort of optimism. For me, I’ll agree with Churchill; yes, I am an optimist, ” it does not seem to be much use being anything else.”

Oh, you mean what exactly? That we should have just ‘voiced’ that we cared? Just, told them that we were behind them? I don’t know if you are familiar with the ‘battered wife’ syndrome, but when someone is constantly beaten down, held back from making outside contacts, kept from getting any ’schooling or job training, and put in fear of their lives everyday…. there comes a point where they completely lose their hope and along with it, their will. It takes some time and some counciling for them to understand that they are worthwhile, that they can make it on their own, that they do have some personal power to make their own decisions, etc.

“Why are you patient now but okay with the fact that war was the first step in our “human rightsâ€Â? campaign in Iraq, even before we declared human rights as our objective? This war has killed 100,000 Iraqis in the meantime, so why is now the time for patience.”

Please, if you want to be taken even halfway seriously you have to quit pulling ridiculous numbers out of your ass…. 100,000??? Yeah, right… the whole reason that we have ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq is so that we don’t have ‘mass civilian causualties’ that bombing from the air would bring. Just to let you in on a little secret, when a study says that there have been between 3,000 and 100,000 deaths…. it isn’t worth using it to wipe your rearend with….

With that said…. with Saddam and his demented sons gone, people won’t be tortured and killed, won’t be fed to lions, tigers or the plastic shredder. Nobody’s tongue will be cut out…. fingers won’t be cut off, and there won’t be entire villages killed. There won’t be the government sanctioned rape rooms, children will not be arrested and jailed, tortured or killed to intimidate the parents. With these things out of the way, it is a little easier to be patient.

“Given how extreme war is as a solution, how quickly we decided to use war, and how extreme the consequences have been, I think that I have the right to demand peace, human rights and democracy pretty damn quickly. ”

You have the right to demand anything that you want. But you, as an adult, also have the responsibility to society to recognize this isn’t the world that you live in. You have to play the cards that you are dealt, even when it isn’t the best hand.

Just out of curiosity, how do you ‘demand peace’?

But, you aren’t facing the fact that they are getting democracy, and it has been pretty darn quick…. we didn’t write their constitution, we don’t get to vote on it, and we don’t live under it, they do! They have to try things out and make amendments to change what doesn’t work…. just as we had to.

Sure, but then what’s the point of our invasion? If you’re willing to have such patience, then why couldn’t we just have supported the Iraqi people from the outside and been patient while they improved their rights themselves? Why are you patient now but okay with the fact that war was the first step in our “human rights” campaign in Iraq, even before we declared human rights as our objective? This war has killed 100,000 Iraqis in the meantime, so why is now the time for patience. Given how extreme war is as a solution, how quickly we decided to use war, and how extreme the consequences have been, I think that I have the right to demand peace, human rights and democracy pretty damn quickly.

The decision was made in 2003, not 2005, with the information that we had then, not what we have now that we have gone in and looked for ourselves. We wouldn’t have this information if we hadn’t gone into Iraq. Saddam would still be playing games with the inspectors….

“However, does this “Monday Morningâ€Â? attitude mean the Administration didn’t ignore evidence that suggested Saddam didn’t have any weapons systems? And furthermore, who’s held accountable for the mistakes and the possibly purposeful oversights? Seemingly nobody.”

Exactly what evidence are you talking about? What evidence did they ‘ignore’? How do you know that it was ignored? How do you know that it wasn’t weighed against what their other intelligence reports said, and they placed a less weight on it than you would have? Who made the mistakes? Would that be every intelligence officer that wrote a report that turned out to not be true? Every superior officer that combined these many different reports and then notified someone higher up of the threat? How about the person that brought it to the President’s attention? The Senate for voting for it? The President for believing the intelligence that was presented to him, or for possibly taking the threats a little more seriously because of the 3000 people that died on 9/11? Exactly where does the blame lay?

“This hypocrisy by Clinton doesn’t mean that Bush is any more right. It isn’t as if now that we know that Clinton was hypocritical that we should go with the worse of two evils- Bush. This article just inadvertantly shows that the anti-war left was correct- that a pre-emptive, “shoot firstâ€Â? mentality is incredibly reckless. ”

Would you still feel this way if it was the reverse? If Bush had decided that we wouldn’t do a pre-emptive move and Saddam really did have WMD’s and used them in our cities???? Or would you have been screaming about the ‘incompetence’ of this Administration?

I think that we both know the answer to that question.

As opposed to the rape rooms? Torture chambers? Watching your child be killed in front of you?

This is Iraq’s constitutiion, it is the one that they created for themselves, it is the one that they voted for. It isn’t supposed to be our constitution, we don’t get to vote on it. As long as there is a way to amend it, and there are elections for the people that run the country, it can always change. Ours did. I really don’t understand how you can expect that they would go from what they had to our constitution overnight? It took us 225 years to get where we are now.

If your logic is about defending your non-support of the Iraq war because you never trusted Bush to tell the truth in the first place, fine, if that’s the logic. If you’re saying skepticism was justified, I agree. I was skeptical, too, and I can show you posts from those weeks and months to prove it.

If your logic is demanding that the “pro-war blogosphere” “admit” your logic, I don’t call that logic, and that’s where I disagree.

You want to know who’s accountable because Saddam fooled the world into thinking he had WMD. I’m also interested in knowing the motivations of people who thought, as I did, that there was a small but reasonable chance he had the bad stuff, and a large chance he was hell-bent on getting the bad stuff at the first opportunity, and using it — and still argued against doing anything to stop him because, y’know, Bush=Halliburton=Israel=Blood for Oil.

Frankly, Bush never convinced me about the war. Tony Blair did. Even the hostile “Guardian” could sum up his position in an appealing way, as it did in this leader from 3/31/03:

Mr Blair has invaded Iraq for different reasons from Mr Rumsfeld. In Mr Blair’s world, Saddam is a moral outrage, both for the way that he treats his own people and for the threat that he poses to others, especially if he were to use weapons of mass destruction or to put them into the hands of terrorists. Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all the nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a series of equitable and humanitarian initiatives - on the Middle East and on reconstruction in particular - which can help to establish what Disraeli, seeking to justify the British invasion of Abyssinia in 1867, called “the purity of our purpose”.

In addition to my own reasoning, I was convinced by the words of leftists like Johann Hari:

Who are the real imperialists here: those who want to carry out the wishes of the Iraqi people, or those who want to ignore them in the name of a non-existent peace? And, yes, it was non-existent. There is no peace if, at any time, people can be captured, tortured, burned or raped. Read the Amnesty reports. This was the everyday reality of Saddam’s Iraq. Only the dishonest can say that British and American soldiers are interrupting “peace”; they are interrupting a decades-long war, waged by Saddam against the Iraqi people, to bring it to an end. Do not weep that this happening; be proud.

…It might seem perverse to seek to spread peace at the barrel of a gun; but the peace we enjoy here in Europe exists only because we (along with the Americans) acted with weaponry to banish tyrants. The Iraqi people want and deserve the same. If their wishes -– as reported unambiguously by Kenneth Joseph and many more like him –- are not compatible with international law, then an urgent priority once this war is over must be to reconstruct international law to make it encourage, not hinder, the overthrow of tyranny. ["The Independent," March 26, 2003]

I was convinced by the likes of the French philosopher André Glucksmann:

Nobody wants war, me included. The question is, is there something worse than war? I have been answering “yes” for years. One thing that is worse than war is genocide –- that is, the extinction of a whole people. Many people said this before Auschwitz. In Greek tragedy, it is revealed in the destruction of Troy. This is indeed the horizon of western history. That is why I don’t believe that the refusal to take part in a war against Saddam should be seen as an expression of humanism, but of a blindness that exists not only in Europe, but in all civilisations. We all want to live peacefully, oblivious and happy. That wish already existed in ancient Athens, and there is nothing wrong with it as such, except that it is not very realistic.

Interviewer: Do you think France will stick to its opposition against the US?

Longer than in Germany. Here in our country, the rivalry with America is more prominent. But at the moment, the people in the street are only asking themselves, how can we stand up against Bush? Saddam Hussein doesn’t come into the equation, and that is where my whole objection lies. Because the issue here is actually Saddam.

Bush is a challenge for American democracy; Aznar, the challenge for Spanish democracy. Why are there fewer protestors in France than in Spain, England or Italy? Because in Italy they fight Berlusconi, in Britain they fight Blair –- and in France they fight nobody.

But the overriding question remains: what about Saddam Hussein? If I may be a little moralistic here: I could not look at myself in the mirror if Saddam Hussein were still in power because I have been to a demonstration against Bush, and as a result, the people in Iraq had to live in this totalitarian regime for another twenty years.

And by another exquisite “Guardian” columnist (now former columnist), David Aaronovitch:

This war for me has always been a fine judgment call, a choice between deeply shitty alternatives (my big argument with some in the anti-war campaign has been their belief that there are — or were — No-Die options in Iraq). Agnostic on the threat of weapons of mass destruction (though believing that Saddam would develop them if permitted to), sceptical on alleged Iraqi links with new Osama bin Laden-type groups, it finally came down to the lesser of these three evils: Saddam unchained; a “contained” Saddam plus sanctions and endless inspections; invasion and no Saddam. In the end, I chose the latter.

Even so, there has always been the possibility of a war that was worse even than another 20 years of Saddam, Uday, Qusay, Chemical Ali and Dr Germ. And there have been moments in the past few days when I have wondered whether we aren’t fighting it.

… Kosovo was, most of us agree, “worth it.” Worth it even though we hit the train on the bridge at Leskovac, killing 10, and the refugee convoy at Prizren in Kosovo which slaughtered more than 70. “Worth it” to both Robin Cook (then foreign secretary) and me. As was the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 or, in Afghanistan, the infamous missile attack on the gun-toting wedding party.

If this sounds callous, my answer is that we make choices like this all the time. Except no one rushes to the scene of motorway crashes to report on how an ill-timed phone-call, speeding, or pre-drive joint has left body parts scattered along the fast lane of the M6. We know it, but you still couldn’t get 500 people to London to call for the end of the motor car. In Kosovo the scenes from the border justified our actions to us at a time when the action seemed most pointless and brutal. Right now, there are no pictures from Baghdad of the summary executions and the beheadings; Rageh Omar has not been taken to see those. Yet. But if we could see inside those buildings and speak to some of the families of victims, the calculation might change.

Or by the American journalist Michael Kelly, who died in April 2003 covering the war in Iraq:

I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realised. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot? ["New Republic," Feb. 26, 2003]

Or by our mutual friend Michael J. Totten:

It’s true that many people are dead in Iraq because of what we did. It’s equally true that a larger number are alive because of what we did. The well-being of Iraqis isn’t even remotely what’s at issue to Mr. Savoy. He only cares that we are morally pure. Tyranny, barbarism, and genocide are fine with him in a lesser-evil sort of way as long as we can sit safe and sound on our side of the ocean and not have to dirty ourselves by messing with it.

Not only is this morally reprehensible, it isn’t even logical. We do not sit safe and sound on this side of the ocean as the terrorism on September 11, preceded by Al Qaeda’s genocidal death warrant, has already shown. The political culture of the Middle East absolutely is our business. Middle Eastern political science topples buildings and kills thousands in our own cities.

Paul Savoy is a September 10th person. He doesn’t understand that we’re war whether we’re happy about it or not.

Or by José Ramos-Horta, 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work in East Timor:

Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early ’80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed “Emperor” Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened–without a U.N. mandate–to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world’s most barbaric regimes.

So why do some think Iraq should be any different? Only a year after his overthrow, they seem to have forgotten how hundreds of thousands perished during Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, under a regime whose hallmark was terror, summary execution, torture and rape. Forgotten too is how the Kurds and Iraq’s neighbors lived each day in fear, so long as Saddam remained in power.

… In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

Or the “anti-totalitarian justification” argument of Adam Michnik, the leading force in the Solidarity trade union movement who founded and edits Poland’s largest daily newspaper:

We take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

…

It’s simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I’ve always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.

…

Well, who was worse, Ronald Reagan or Leonid Brezhnev? If I were American I would never have voted for Reagan, but as a Pole, I liked the tough position of Reagan toward Brezhnev. Perhaps Reagan did not quite understand what he was doing, and maybe Bush doesn’t understand either. But the facts are that, suddenly, Libya has begun to speak a different language. Syria has begun to speak a different language. Even North Korea has started to speak a different language. This is not to say that Bush is always right. Of course not. But you must see the hierarchy of threats, of dangers. I asked my French and German friends, Are you afraid that tomorrow Bush will bomb Paris? And can you really be sure that terrorists and fundamentalists will not attack the Louvre? So which side are you on?

So, if you want to discuss this “pro-war” blogger (a label I reject but realize I can’t avoid) and his thoughts about war on Saddam, start with those references and not with an assumption of ideological lock-step identification with the White House.

Look: You go to a used car salesman, and he starts pushing this blue Buick on you. He rants and raves about the paint job and the hue and the special scratch-proof coating. But frankly you happen to like Buicks and you look at the engine and you test drive it, and you decide to buy it, because you like the whole package, including but not limited to the color.

If we’re getting metaphorical, the words “Blue! Scratch Proof Coating!” are written in bold, 360 pt font on the Buick, while the rest of the information about the engine and what not is 10 pt.

You’re trying to justify your point of view. I’m trying to justify mine. And I do see the logic in your point and have said as much on this blog.

I ask then, why can’t you see the logic in mine?

On the other hand, as every single post-war report on WMD has made clear, he was dead set on reconstituting his weapons programs at the first available opportunity. And the sanctions against his regime, which kept the essential material out of his hands, were crumbling in 2002 — again, see the reports.

The sanctions were a blunt tool; to be broad enough to be effective, they allowed Saddam to cause a lot of innocent Iraqis to suffer. The people who were shouting to end the sanctions in 1999 are the same ones, in my experience, who were saying give the sanctions more time to work in 2003. I’ve even seen one bumper-sticker-covered truck around town that has two different decals for each of those positions.

The threat I remember in 2002-03, and that I wrote about then, was that there was even a 2 percent chance that Saddam had, or was within a year of getting, a nuclear bomb or a serious chemical weapon.

That was what was in my head when I thought about going to war. Not certainty. Potential. Do you go to war if there’s a 2 percent chance he has them? Do you go to war if there’s a 40 percent chance? What’s your degree of risk? What else is there to be gained by it? Liberation? Spreading democracy? Draining the swamp? I imagine the same sort of poker calculus was going on in the White House. Maybe you don’t like poker. I’m sorry; I can’t change the world for you.

There were doubts. There were vectors of possibility. There were non-valid reasons pushing hard on either side of the war debate. And there was the great big hole in New York City that I looked down Chambers Street into.

If there hadn’t been an overthrow of Saddam, we still would be wondering what sort of weapons he had stashed away. John Kerry certaqinly would have made it a major point of his campaign in ‘04 that Bush had left this dangerous threat to America go undealt-with.

One of the most forecful anti-war arguments put forth in 2002-03 was that Saddam would use his WMD against our troops, or against Saudi Arabia or Israel to spread the war.

The problem is that many of the vocal lefties in the blogopshere who were pro-war didn’t really care about WMDs.

I can tell you I have never read a single commentator, Internet or otherwise, who in 2002-03 was saying, “WMD, schWMD, who cares? Let’s go to war!” Got any names to go with that?

So let’s never dismiss the fact that this war, while justified to some, was sold to the world as a pre-emptive attack against WMDs that could get into the hands of terrorists. The idea of spreading democracy and getting rid of Saddam were secondary, and I wish the pro-war blogopshere would start being more upfront about this.

Let’s pretend you’re right. Let’s pretend Bush and Blair and the rest didn’t devote hours and hours to talking about the big picture in Iraq. Let’s pretend that the effort to get the U.N. onboard — a worthwhile but doomed effort — didn’t depend entirely on proving that Saddam was in violation of the peace articles from 1991 and the U.N. resolutions, which, by the definition of the U.N. can’t deal with things like promoting democracy and freedom or massacring your own citizens.

Why do you want this upfrontness? What would it do for you? Except weaken your enemy by backing him into a corner where he doesn’t belong, the better to bundle every war supporter and Dick Cheney into one helpless punching bag.

We all supported the war for different reasons and a different mix of reasons. There were paranolid hawks in the camp; there were feminists in the camp; there were Nobel Peace prize winners in the camp. George Bush had his reasons; I had mine. You want to fight Bush, go write him a letter. Don’t ask me to put on a Bush mask so you can throw your rotten tomatoes my way.

Look: You go to a used car salesman, and he starts pushing this blue Buick on you. He rants and raves about the paint job and the hue and the special scratch-proof coating. But frankly you happen to like Buicks and you look at the engine and you test drive it, and you decide to buy it, because you like the whole package, including but not limited to the color.

Do you have to spend the rest of your ownership of that car telling everyone you meet, “I only bought it because the salesman raved about the color blue”?

Nice refresher on the state of affairs on Iraq at the turn of the century. This makes me wonder even more why Saddam wanted the world to think he had WMD capabilities. Why play such a dangerous game with the UN inspectors? Not that there wasn’t evidence that it was all a bluff, but why wave a red flag in front of the international community in the first place? They guy has bravado to spare, but I’ve never thought he was an idiot.

On an unrelated (but on topic) slant, this does explain why the NYT higher-ups aren’t falling over themselves to make a scapegoat of Judith Miller. Plenty of Iraq hysteria blame to go around at the Times, it seems.

But just because the Clinton administration believed it, and the world intelligence community believed it, doesn’t mean it was true OR justified. And as David Kay, former head of the weapon’s inspectors, told NPR today it turned out not to be true. Obviouly, a serious evaluation needs to be done of how we gather such intelligence since it was so off.

Now, as everybody knows, I was recently in the “Bush Lied” crowd, and you must understand that given the seemingly weak evidence that they produced PRE-war, many of us were skeptical that he was actually telling the truth. However, this has personally given way to the explanation of simply being mistaken because of massive bad information within all levels of government. However, does this “Monday Morning” attitude mean the Administration didn’t ignore evidence that suggested Saddam didn’t have any weapons systems? And furthermore, who’s held accountable for the mistakes and the possibly purposeful oversights? Seemingly nobody.

The problem is that many of the vocal lefties in the blogopshere who were pro-war didn’t really care about WMDs. They just wanted Saddam gone. So let’s never dismiss the fact that this war, while justified to some, was sold to the world as a pre-emptive attack against WMDs that could get into the hands of terrorists. The idea of spreading democracy and getting rid of Saddam were secondary, and I wish the pro-war blogopshere would start being more upfront about this.