Nicely put Shane. I like the idea of hitting them before they hit us, but the reality is that they can indeed hit us first (if not continually) while we negotiate (pick any embassy bombing, hijacking, car bombing, homicide/suicide bombing, etc. from any terrorist group). These actions are called terrorist, but if a third world nation nation wanted to damage a world leader, these would be reasonable tactics for them to use. Lets face it, history is full of examples of smaller groups staging quick hit and run attacks on much larger opponents (nobody stood toe-to-toe with the Romans at the height of their empire, yet Rome did indeed eventually burn). Also, hit and run attacks are notoriously inexpensive and hard (or impossible) to trace. A nation could be attacked by another nation and "dismiss" it as a terrorist attack.

Let's say (theoretically) that a country wanted to attack Australia. They could recruit 100 commandos and give them time released aerosol canisters for the dispersement of Anthrax. Send them, "on vacation", to various major cities in Australia. Have them plant several of these canisters in air vents (in shopping malls for example) with time triggers and then return home. A month later, thousands or millions in Australia are sick or dying from inhaled Anthrax. This type of attack would probably be attributed to terrorists (who would gladly claim credit) but it could easly be from another nation bent on the destruction of Australia. The cost for such an attack would be pretty low and it would be possible to never see the build up. For that matter, several such widespread attacks could pave the way for an actual military exercise and presto, Australia falls to a tiny nation that couldn't ordinarily match them militarily. Ok, there is the reality that if anyone attacked Australia, the US would stand with Australia, so the military exercise would have to take that into account, but if the US were tied up elsewhere, who knows?

It is a sad truth that old people declare wars but the young fight them. I'm not old, but I am beyond the age where the US military would accept me in combat. They'd probably accept me as a consultant or analyst, but that wouldn't be in a war zone. Nonetheless, I still have to consider that there are things worth going to war for, and the reality is that I have children that may end up in war in their lives if certain things aren't handled today. As such, I don't only look at war through the eyes of someone in the army today, but through the eyes of my children in the future if something isn't done today.

I too agree with the removal of Sadam Hussein. I agree that there were huge mistakes in the intelligence that justified the decision to go to war. What I can't stand is people saying that we were lied to. A lie is a conscious decision to tell a falsehood when someone knows the truth. There isn't any evidence that anyone lied about Hussein, they simply didn't know the whole truth. I recall the speeches made and I recall from the language used that we suspected certain things, and had some evidence, but that the evidence was far from certain. Nonetheless, if the evidence and suspicions were true (and every intelligence agency in the world agreed that they were very likely), then we had to act because of what we knew of Saddam Hussein. That isn't a lie, it wasn't then and it isn't now. The fact that the suspicions and evidence appear to have been wrong doesn't make the statements lies. It simply makes them wrong.
I also remember that in December of 2002, before the coalition attacked Iraq, discussing whether it made sense to attack Iraq. My statement back then was that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed. He had killed hundreds of thousands or even millions of his own people. He had shown disregard for treaties he had signed. He had brutally treated people in his own country and that of Kuwait and he wasn't about to comply with UN resolutions. Even back then, that was my justification for support of the war. WMDs were simply one reason, one that was probably false. There were many others.
So don't talk about being lied to. There wasn't any lying involved, most people simply focused on one issue and when the WMDs didn't appear, they forgot the rest of why we did what we did.

-- Jeff

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"Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." --Ronald Reagan