I thank you as well for your approach to having a civilized discussion on a very important topic even though we are on opposite sides of the fence.
My support of the war is not based on the fact that they might or might not have had WMD's or that they were a direct and immediate threat to the US. There are a number of countries in the world that represent a threat to us and our way of life, some more directly than others.
Here are my thoughts on that, we choose who is our enemy and who is not our enemy, if you recall at one time we were on the same team as Saddam Hussein, we stood behind him during the Iran Iraq war. What changed? You could say the turning point occurred when he invaded Kuwait, but I have read that behind the scenes we gave him the wink on that one and he fell for it. That may or not be true but I don't always trust the people running our foreign policy. Anyway, the end result is that Iraq became the enemy. The part that does not square with me is why go to war when he was cornered, he could not make a move in his own country without some weapons inspector breathing down his neck. Wouldn't it have been much cheaper to just keep a huge team of weapons inspectors in his country indefinitely rather than what we have now? That is why I think there is more to the "why" we are there than meets the eye. I have a very high litmus test for war and for shedding American blood.