I am not in support of starting a war with Iraq. But I am still pro-war when the cause is necessary, and the all the combatants understand the risk, and there is no unnecessary risk to non-combatants. War is actually necessary for the mental well-being of a lot of powerful leaders.(Especially when football season ends.) We can't do much to make it fair for Iraq, but at least on our side we can truthfully discuss the risks to our own boys and girls, and let the cause itself dictate if it can produce enough volunteers. The USA seems to have enough such volunteers without imposing on those who would question the cause. (Enough so that we could definitely fight multiple wars, if manpower was the only question.)
As far as honesty by the leaders about the cause and the risks, I'm not sure about this one. If we have proof that Iraq is an imminent threat to us then that should be enough. I haven't seen it, but Saddam appears villainous enough to have done a lot of what we say he has. He looks just like the villain with the big moustache who ties the distressed damsel to the railroad tracks in those old silent films.
My reservations, though, are as follows:
So far, I only know of one country that has actually used weapons of mass destruction on defenseless men, women and children on a truly grand scale. This was the USA while bombing Japan. The USA was also the worst offender in using WMD, although to a lesser extent, when we carpet bombed and therefore obliterated entire cities in Germany and at least one in France. In this case, our cause was correct, but I don't think it really gave us the right to command the deaths of so many civilians.
The USA is still my favorite country, I just think we made a big moral mistake. If it weren't so easy for Japan, France and Germany to prove that we had been guilty of this ourselves, we would no doubt have categorized these mistakes as war crimes at Nuremberg.
Also, our UN-sanctioned, US-UK-enforced biological war against Iraq (by enforcing starvation) has already killed many times more than terrorists' toll in the US in 2001.
Also I think the term finishing a war with Iraq makes more sense than your question about starting a war. We had half the country of Iraq declared a no-fly zone and have admitted to regularly dropping bombs on Iraq for over a decade.
Also, we have appeared untrustworthy and hypocritical in our attempts to tie Saddam's regime with terrorism against the USA. He may very well have done this, and he's definitely a threat to do so, but not in the way our administration has tried to connect the pieces. His very war against the Kurds (which we like to call "his own people" even though they are the very people the CIA claims to have worked with to fight Saddam) has made Saddam even more hated by Al-Qaeda, because Saddam was also attempting to destroy Al-Qaeda groups and their protectors and their ilk among the Kurds. Most Muslim fundamentalists are active to rid the world of peole like Saddam and Saudi oil sheiks. How confused the world outside of FOX News must be when they get reports that the CIA is monitoring (rather than crushing) chemical weapons experiments by the Kurds in Northern Iraq. I'm not saying all these reports are true, but the US does nothing to explain our obvious non-response to questioning countries. (Just take a look at international newspapers on the Net, even those who hate Saddam.)
And why are we such friends with Turkey, never mentioning their mega-genocides, but happy to focus on mini-genocides by any country on our bad side?
Outside of those concerns...I say, Why not?
Gamaliel
