I applaud your gumption to get involved and express an opinion…and certainly your points are echoed in the minds of many Americans who are currently being spoon-fed a diet of spin. How can we NOT feel profound aversion to an egomaniacal thug like Saddam Hussein. How indeed….

BUT, Kari Ann, as Emily suggested, you have to look at the history…at OUR historical predisposition to put into power what we concieve to be puppet dictators, but who turn out to be madmen. Our hypocracy in this regard is appalling. We supported (at some point in their careers), or at least were indifferent to, a slough of really, really bad men! Papa “Doc” Duvalier, Ida Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, Hitler (very indifferent until Pearl Harbor!), Sakarno, and a whole boatload of thugs and murderers in South America.

If it’s OK to take over a country and say that commandeering their natural resources is a “so-be-it” by-product of the war effort, I’d have to say that maybe the rest of the world has every right to be leary of our manifest destiny tendencies.

At any rate, I think most Americans take it for granted that engaging in a war in Iraq is a stroll in the park. We’ll walk all over them, we think, and perhaps that’s true. But right now, as Jeremy pointed out, there are many far more sinister threats to our well-being, including those being inacted by our own dubious administration–sliding under the radar as we are continually fed every snippet that can suggest a reason to go to war.

I, for one, am very concerned.

Although I am well aware what Saddam is doing to his people, I am not convinced that he poses as large a threat to America as the administration would scare us into believing or that his reign is killing any more Iraqi civilians than our sanctions do and our bomb-dropping would. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reading up on the damage U.S. bombs and sanctions have done to Iraq and its people over the past decade since the end of the Gulf War. Again, no defense of Saddam, but the notion that we’d attack Iraq as a humanitarian effort is hypocritical and unsubstantiated.

The other thing that I hear little about is what the U.S. plans on doing AFTER we overthrow Saddam. In what condition will we leave Iraq? We left Afghanistan in a horrible mess after we pulled out in the 80’s and look what happened - the country was in such chaos, it produced the Taliban. What plan do we have around preventing such chaos from occurring in Iraq? I hear almost nothing of this…it’s all about “going in there and getting rid of Saddam”.

These are points to ponder in addition to some of Jeremy’s points.

1) Dubya is using Iraq as a weapon of mass distraction to cover his ass (i.e. the economy, the on-going attempts to shred the bill of rights, his efforts to create a permanent aristocracy,…).

2)Dubya has produced exceedingly little evidence to show Iraq is a threat to the US or the region. Yes Saddam is a thug, but he is a contained thug who is having most of his weapons taken away.

3)The link between Al Qaeda and Iraq’s Baath Party is extremely tenuous.

4)The Axis of Evil is gibberish. Not to say the governments of North Korea, Iran and Iraq are actually nice, but to imply a link between the three is laughable. Does anyone remember the decade long Iran-Iraq war?

5)Why will diplomacy work for the situation in North Korea and not for Iraq? North Korea has nukes, whereas Iraq has about 1/3 of their military leftover from when we kicked their ass last time. Yeah, Iraq might have chemical weapons, but what about all of the chemical and biological weapons that are missing from the former USSR? Should we invade Russia?

6)Afghanistan is still in ruins and must be stabilized and made something resembling secure before any large scale military action in the region should even be considered.

7)The situation in Israel must be completely addressed before any large scale military action should be considered.

8)What is the exit strategy? Given that Dubya is on record as being against nation building, smashing the Baath Party and promptly leaving is not going to help our situation.