You know, if we could all take our partisan hats off for a minute, and dispense (at least temporarily) with the juvenile name-calling, we might try to lay out a few facts that people might be able to agree on:

1. The terrorists are the ones who are resoponsible for the 9/11 attacks. However, the fact that the attacks occurred means that we Americans didn't do enough to stop them. That is true of the eight-month-old Bush administration, and also of the Clinton administration. If this situation calls for public apologies from government officials (debatable how much good that actually does), then there are plenty of people who ought to be offering them up.

2. The US government may have taken a more aggressive and impatient posture toward Iraq than many people, in the US and elsewhere, feel that it should have. Part of the reason for this is that the UN had shown itself to be a paper tiger, and was not taken seriously by Saddam Hussein's regime. The UN has relied on the US to be its primary "muscle" for most of its history. It puts the member countries in a fairly comfortable position, since they can make demands, pass tough sounding resolutions, and then sit back and let the US take care of it -- and THEN complain that the US is too heavy-handed. It would be nice if the UN were an effective organization, but it really is not. The UN passed a lot of resolutions (a lot of them), but was unwilling to enforce them. The UN is not blameless in this matter.

3. The technology of war-making in the present day does not afford us the luxury of sitting back and evaluating threats for extended periods of time before acting on them. Perhaps the US is too rash in responding to potential threats, but if the US approach is the wrong one, someone should propose an alternative approach. Weapons of mass destruction are proliferating, and there are a number of terrorist organizations in the world -- large, small, state-sponsored, and independent -- that have shown a clear desire to obtain them and use them in large-scale terrorist acts. If the world is collectively concerned about this, then the world has to take collective action -- it's not enough to just express the concern, and then bitch about the countries like the US that are attempting to do something about it.

4. The pre-war situation in Iraq had to change, and the US was the only country willing and able to lead the charge. Iraq was a threat to the world community and to his own people, and economic sanctions were not working. The fact that Saddam Hussein was only one of a number of bad actors on the world stage is not a good reason for letting him get away with it.

How's that for a start?