BB - Active combat? I'm sure. If some pilots from a superpower were flying and bombing over Canada on a daily basis for 10 years in a big "no-fly" zone that THEY had unilaterally declared to exist over British Columbia and the Maritimes, I guess we'd shoot at them. You bet we would. That's what happens when you violate the airspace of a sovereign nation.

My impression is that it would not have mattered WHAT Saddam had done to comply with Bush's demands...and he did a lot. The decision to invade had been made long before the demands were ever made. The rest was window-dressing for the benefit of public PR. Saddam knew it. There was nothing he could do, other than to simply flee his own country and go into exile. He certainly was not going to do that...and even if he had, it would have been followed by an American intervention anyway, because Iraq would have become de-stabilized. The decision to invade Iraq was made a long way back, and had nothing to do with any threat that Iraq posed to the USA or the Western World. It had to do with oil and power politics. It had to do with gaining strategic resources and strategic positioning in the Middle East.

In terms of George Bush himself...I think he's a fairly naive man, and he may well believe a great deal of what he says about his reasons for invading Iraq. I don't think the men behind him are nearly so naive, and I am referring to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and whoever else is behind them. Bush is their puppet, in my opinion, but Bush himself is probably not really aware of that. I actually feel a bit sorry for him at times. I bet he was happier running the baseball team.