[Critter]

What if we suppose that this framing the war in the context of Iraq's noncompliance with UN resolutions is just a delaying tactic by Bush, in order to buy time to try and root out the domestic threat?

I keep wondering why, in light of 9/11, and that fact that we are waging war against terrorism, Bush is using 12 year old excuses for a war with Iraq. The easiest way to win support for this war would be to tie Saddam to 9/11, and claim that Saddam supported and still supports terrorism.

Any other reason for war against Iraq invites resistence.

[The Great Satan]

What if we suppose that this framing the war in the context of Iraq's noncompliance with UN resolutions is just a delaying tactic by Bush, in order to buy time to try and root out the domestic threat?

Correct. Except "root out" isn't really the right way to put it. The domestic threat can never be definitively rooted out, by the very nature of the sleeper strategem. "YOU CAN NOT STOP US," was the boast in the anthrax letters, and that is perfectly true. But that does not mean that we can do nothing against the threat Saddam presented in those letters. We can and will blunt the threat, but that is not something that can occur on a timescale of a few weeks or months. We are at T+18 already, and it will probably be T+36 before we have seriously degraded his ability to hit us or our allies.