What started out as a worthy discussion, has kind of deteriorated, hmm?

Let me draw you back to actually discussing this. GreenwichNJ, you tend to do what so many Bush supporters do, and that is to jump over accurate statements and reality, to spouting what is pretty much just righteous fervor (gut stuff ... please try for something that comes from a little higher up).

So how about bending it to responding to these points (which have already been mentioned).

We had no right to go against the international laws which we were instrumental in building in the first place. We have made our own policies and good intentions look frivolous and we appear to be contemptuous of all other countries, by doing so (IN FACT, most people who I have ever heard still standing in favor of that action, are content to accept that we ARE contemptuous of the UN, and all the countries that took part in it.) Which disturbs me both intellectually AND on a gut level. Whether it was effectual or not, the one country which destroyed the UN's possibility of future usefulness, was US.

By doing this, we thumbed our nose at policies which we once used to execute Nazi killers. We have made ourselves, thus, vulnerable to attack by other countries who have as much right as we did, to say that international laws be damned.

If something should have been done about Hussein (and many of us believe it would have eventually occurred, in a manner that did not make the arrogance of the US such a baldly glaring issue), it absolutely needed to have been done by the international community. Bush should be tried by the same system which tried Malosevich. If he is not, then we need to give up on ever trying to rejoin the UN. Which again, I presume you are all right with.

If we believe ourselves to be above international law ... which we evidently do ... then let us not pretend that our killing off an unpopular and brutal leader was for the benefit of anyone but ourselves. We thumb our noses at Germans, French, Iranians, Saudis. We find them unworthy and ignore their input. If they have disagreed with our savior in the White Hat, we can't even hear what they're saying over the rush of blood fury pumping through our veins.

We did not care about the killing of Iraqis. If we CARED about the killings, we'd have tried to find a way to get rid of Hussein without doing exactly what the international community was trying to tell us would happen. If we'd cared about how many Hussein had killed, we wouldn't callously today refuse to consider the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed because of our misadventure. When we discuss how many have died in Iraq today, we say that 4,000 American troops have been killed. We did NOT do this in order to save Iraqis from brutal extremism. If we had, we'd have gathered as much information from the entire international community as we could have gotten, and we'd have tried plan after plan after plan.

At the very least, we'd have listened when, after "winning" in Iraq, we were told, "Thank you. Now you have 30 days to get out of our country."

No. Instead, we thumbed our noses at the Iraqis YOU just are sure that we saved from something worse than what they have today!

Okay, I had much more to say. But I find myself frothing. We moderates hate frothing.