[PornoDoggy]

I did not deliberately misrepresent your point - it came across to me the same way it seemed to CJ. With all due respect, your post is the one that came across as an emotional response.

But you didn't just bring up the whole "attrocity" issue, did you?

Which attrocities? The gassing of the Kurds, which the Defense Department is not convinced was actually done by Saddam - strong evidence suggests it was done by the Iranians?

Or maybe the military repression and revenge against the Kurds in the North, and the Shites in the South, who rebelled when encouraged to do so by the U.S. and were then left stranded high and dry?

In spite of the propaganda, do you really think that Saddam's record of represssion, torture and "atrocities" is that much better than many of the nations that the U.S. regards as friends and continues to aid? Egypt and Saudia Arabia leap immediately to mind.

The U.N. has fiddle-farted around while millions of Africans have been killed in at least a dozen coutries. The U.N. dilly-dallied around for a long while while hundreds of thousands, if not a million, were massacred in East Timor - a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism on the doorstep of Australia - and probably wouldn't have done much without Australian pressure, demands and leadership. The U.N. sat and watched Afganistan slip into the dark night of the Taliban without doing anything.

Why - because it is irrelevant? If it is irreleveant the U.S. plays a big role in that. Different groups of Security Council members have have blocked U.N. action on all of these issues - the United States the equal of any of them in that category. In Africa all of the Permanent Members wrung their hands, knashed their teeth, and quietly blocked action. In East Timor, if I remember correctly, Australia had to shame the U.N. into action, and had to overcome some U.S. resistance to U.N. involvement.

So you are right. No one besides the United States, apparently, has gotten up over the last twelve years and decried the very real torture and murder of hundreds of dissidents in Iraq. But in the grand scheme of things ... Iraq is a pretty small problem.

I'm all for disarming Saddam Hussein. I'm all for waging war against him for his refusal to disarm/comply with the agreements he made with the U.N. But let's keep this discussion real, shall we? This will eliminate a threat. But...

It will not stop terrorism against the United States - it will increase it. It will not stop terrorism against Israel - it will increase it. It will do NOTHING to get to and stop the people who attacked the United States on 9/11 - it will help them by greatly increasing the radicalization of a large portion of the Arab world, and serve as a marvelous recruiting tool for the likes of alQaida. It will not spread democracy movements to other countries in the area like Saudia Arabia - as I heard a man say on televsion tonight, talk of spreading Jeffersonian democracy into a country that still having discussions about whether it's appropriate to allow women to drive is a tad optomistic, don't you think? - any changes made will be superficial, and may in fact create a backlash of oppression by governments concerned with maintaining control.

I have said it before and I'll say it again - I think it's a job we need to do. I find some of the mindless pipedreams about the wonderful post-Saddam world I hear tossed irritating as hell, because it's pure fantasy.