1) There's a difference between broke and able to borrow money and broke and NOT able to borrow money. Guess which of the two is where we find ourselves now?

We can still borrow money. We're doing it right now.

2) I knew the WMD's were probably not nuclear. I thought they were chemical or biological and could have been used on us in war or in a terrorist attack in some European city. YOU would not know whether there were WMD's or not - pre-war. To claim otherwise is farce.

Of course not. But you can tell a lot by observing the people who get better intel briefings than I do. By the behavior of our leaders (American and British) I was able to infer that they didn't take those claims seriously. And remember that we helped Saddam acquire chemical weapons in the first place and then turned a blind eye when he used them (for as long as he was useful, anyway). A little bit late in the game to start trying on white hats.

Going with the second option (walking away) would have led to a serious nuclear arms race with all the Middle East countries that have money. At the moment only Iran is belligerently going after nuclear weapons. Had Bush done a good job not even Iran would be pushing for these weapons.

A serious nuclear arms race? How? Why? Who? Justify that assumption. As for your second point, I would argue that had Bush not invaded two nation's right on Iran's border, lumped them in as part of the Axis of Evil (with their archnemesis and a third wheel thousands of miles away--as if those three countries constituted an axis of anything but not having much to do with each other) and did everything possible to make Iran feel cornered, they might not have much incentive for going after nuclear weapons at all. Again, they're meant to deter invasion; in this case ours. Our bellicosity is largely responsible for the current tensions between Iran and the US. As well as the sticky fact that the CIA overthrew their democratically elected prime minister and installed a military dictator back in 1953. People have a hard time forgetting things like that.

As far as your apples and oranges comparison goes: Washington, Jefferson, nor Adams were Saddam Hussein. If they were maybe France would have made the mistake to hang around.

First, Saddam is more like George III in my analogy, and the Iraqi Shi'ites (and maybe Kurds, if they were feeling feisty that week) would be like the Continental Army. Please try to keep up. Second, micromanaging the affairs of a former British colony would never have been in the interests of the French, and they knew it. Besides, France was still a monarchy at that time, so they had no ideological axe to grind in the first place.

We most certainly had to invade. It delayed a regional nuclear arms race at the very least. But I'll take your advice on the French example and say lets LEAVE.

You have yet to actually show this other than to slip into histrionics about phantom nuclear arms races (how about India and Pakistan, by the way?). And if our invasion was really the sole factor saving us from that, then why leave? Do you see this danger as having passed? If so, why? Saddam had no capability to make nuclear weapons, that much was made clear when we got in the country. His programs had been halted years before with no progress made since. So who would be part of this arms race, and why would the presence or absence of Saddam be the key factor in whether or not it happened? I'm interested in seeing you try to support that opinion.

:-)