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Good piece.

In most cases, the pro-war and anti-war people are talking right past each other. I guess Paul O'Neill is going to announce in an interview aired tomorrow that the Bush Administration was planning war with Iraq right from the first days of his administration.

This seems to shock anti-war people but for me its comforting that Bush came into office, mind already made up that he was not going to pussyfoot with Saddam. 10 years was enough, time to bring it to an end.

The WMD argument is definitely a wasted argument, because for the pro-war people, its a non-issue, we were for the war for other reasons. And the anti-war people were against it even if there were WMD; you will remember that one of their arguments before the war started was that our guys would be killed in droves by WMD, and that the chemical and biological agents would poison Iraqis. And it would be our fault.

The whole argument about whether or not Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake is a wasted argument because the "antis" ignore the fact that he already had several hundred tons of the stuff. They have been pounding away at us for the radiation poisoning of Iraqi civilians who looted the uranium storage facility.

Of course the Joe Wilson column where he denies Bush's charge concerning yellow-cake was itself a rather sophomoric lie, perhaps a clintonian lie, in that while Bush said Iraq "sought" uranium, which is public information, Wilson asserts that Iraq did not "purchase" any uranium in Africa. And even that remains an open subject since Wilson's other lie is to claim he investigated it, when he most assuredly did not by his own words.

The "antis" persistently deny that we invaded Iraq because of the mass graves, but the fact is that those graves are at the heart of the problem. No one cares that India has nuclear weapons, because India has no mass graves. No one would have cared that Saddam invaded Kuwait, if it was just a matter of one Arab replacing another. He had, after all, invited the US to invest in his oil industry and Bechtel was gearing up for a megaproject right on the eve of war. By supporting Saddam we could have had Kuwait and Iraq's oil both.

But while Kuwaiti emirs aren't democrats, they are also not homicidal maniacs. Big difference. So we ejected Saddam from Kuwait.

And while Bush Senior was anxious to declare victory and go home, the very publicized slaughter of Kurds and Shias forced him to institute the no-fly patrols, which is how we got to where we are today. The mass graves are right at the heart of how we came to be sitting in Baghdad. It wasn't oil, our no-fly zones left the oil in Saddam's hands right up until the very end. If it was oil, we would have occupied the no-fly zones a decade ago, and a hundred thousand Iraqis would still be alive today.

Everything you say is completely true... but unfortunately it will not have an iota of effect on the anti-war, liberal, and anti-bush crowds. Nor will it stop them from using the same lies that have time and time again been proven to be lies.

Too bad.

I just got tired of fighting the WRONG fight with these people. I am tired of meeting them on their field of battle, rebutting their lies, time and time again. EVeryone of these arguments has been proven to be wrong... but that does not stop them. You lop off one head of the hydra and two more pop up. From now on, when faced with these strawman arguments, we should not rebut their argument... make them come to us and try to rebut our war on terrorism rationale!