Wow, this thread has exploded. I'm not sorry I read my way through it.
Whether or not we are here as gardeners, 9/11, the Iraq war, and this
election may well turn out to be pivotal events of our lifetimes. I want to
address one little issue - WMDs in Iraq. We KNOW (or knew) that there WERE
WMD's in Iraq, because we were one of the suppliers of WMD's to Iraq in the
1980's. (Hence the famous picture of Donald Rumsfield, all smiles, jovially
shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1986). We supplied them to Iraq because
it was fighting a big 10 year long war with Iran in which there were well
over 1,000,000 casualties. People get worked up over the wrong angle of WMD
arguments. The question should not be, and should not have been in 2002/2003
"did Iraq once have WMDs?". The question should have been, "did Iraq have
WMD's in sufficient quantity left after 2 major wars to pose any kind of
threat to the Western world?". The answer, even before the UN weapons
inspectors, and LONG BEFORE David Kay, was "no". The answer was known, and
the CIA issued oodles of caveats in its assessments, which anyone reading
between the lines could have interpreted easily. But there was no will to
interpret facts that way - in fact, there was significant and unrelenting
pressure to read the facts the opposite way. The administration issued a
legal paper before the war to try to cover its butt, about legal
justifications for pre-emptive wars. The ONLY legal justification was/is to
demonstrate an immediate or imminent danger. The paper purported to show
that, since terrorists might get access to WMD's under certain regimes, any
information regarding possession of WMD's by such regimes was adequate to
justify a pre-emptive war, since terrorists act without warning - hence the
imminent danger part. That is why there was such an incredible push to drum
up the quantity of such weapons and the danger they would present to the
western world. Without those weapons in sufficient quantity, the whole legal
justification for the war has evaporated completely, meaning that
essentially we are occupying Iraq illegally, and have been since April 2003.
All the grandstanding by Bush about how evil Saddam Hussein was and how
important it was to get rid of him does not make it any more legal. There
are reasons why the Bush administration has sought every possible reason to
exempt the US from any sort of authority wielded by the World Court. The
reality is that the people of Iraq could sue the US for an illegal invasion
and occupation, and easily win.