Actually Israel is funded by the US, if we quit funding them they'd run out of steam but I really truly don't think that it is our problem, as no one would come to our aid if we needed it.

This is uncivil and insulting.

Apparently anyone who disagrees with your subjective opinion on the matter is brainless.

I thus conclude you are an idiot.

I'd be happy to discuss the issue, or even show you where your 'facts' are in error, but your insults suggest that I'd be wasting my time to bother.

Your behavior is NOT condusive to civil discussion. You are trying to act like a bully.

Also going to your original post matthew, the taliban have returned to Iraq, Clinton did not want to go there. George W just wanted to finish what his dad started, IMHO, and we have no right to be there.

Taliban returning to Iraq??? Are you not confused with Afghanistan?

And technically, it can be argued the US/coalition do have a (tenuous) claim on legality in their invasion of Iraq (arrising from the terms of the 1991 post-Kuwait agreement between the UN and Saddam).

* * *

Personally, I hold that the invasion of Iraq was bad policy since it was quite easy to predict the sectarian violence and failure of imposing democracy on Iraq. Anyone who knew anything about political science and Middle Eastern history could have (and did) predict the quagmire the US was walking into.

The US position regarding the Kurds and the Turks (for example) was just completely glossed over from day one. Anyone who understood Middle Eastern history and politics knows that this was guarenteed to be a major problem for the US - yet nothing has ever been done to address this highly predictable problem.

Likewise with Iran. It doesn't take a rocket-scientist to have seen that any US deposition of Saddam was going to be a boon for Iran.

I'm not opposed to war in principle, I'm opposed to dumb wars that make the world less safe and more dangerous than it was before (and kills a bunch of people for no good reason).

Disagree with what? It was a cessfire that holded the war off for 12 years, and saddam kepted doing what he was doing. That is a fact. We most likely should of nuked the place instead of invading. That would of been a lot less costly for us, that is were we errored.

If we nuked Iraq, I am pretty sure the UN would had imposed sanctions on us, if not worse.

Anyone who thinks nuking anyone or anything is a good idea is not to be taken seriously by anyone.

You can be sure the world's collective reaction would be much more substantial than a few sanctions. All out war would be a better prediction.

This thread looks fun. IMO there was no real reason to go into Iraq and now we have realized there were no WMD that Georgie was so adamant about. Honestly my view was always GW was there to clean up daddy's mess because he obviously couldnt finish the job and the 9/11 attacks gave him more than enough ammo to get into iraq. Its quite baffling that equal to potentially more resources were spend to find Saddam than were used to find Bin Laden. My final beef with it is, even if Iraq had WMD what were they going to do with them? Hit Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, maybe Iran? Their technology is so far behind that they were barely a regional threat with their weapons and certainly posed no threat to the mainland US. Seems somewhat illogical to attack someone who is atleast 5-10 years away from even being a threat. If we were really going after a WMD threat why didnt we just go barging in on N Korea, they could most likely take out a sizeable portion of Alaska or the west coast.

Sudam could have easily moved his WOMD to another country or hid them so well that we would not find them.