Apologies for further thread drift, but this response to Teribus will not, I hope, be wholly irrelevant.

Teribus, I said that the US "had lived with terrorism in the world" pre-9/11." The administration's apparent belief that it could support terrorists when comvenient, safe in the knowledge that terrorism could never touch the US mainland, was misguided and naive. This is not hindsight: I and many others were pointing out, long before 9/11, the absurdity of investing billions in NMD when a nuclear device could be delivered in a container.

The bottom line for me is that the Iraq invasion was the first time in my lifetime that my country (the UK) was party to starting a war. If a pre-emptive strike is to have any morality at all, it is surely incumbent on the agressors - in this case the UK and US - to establish that the intelligence on which their belligerence is predicated is accurate beyond all reasonable doubt.

In this case it demonstrably was not. Iraq turns out to have been no threat at all, by any reckoning. Saddam had simply been deceiving the world community, for whatever reason (possibly to maintain credibility in the Arab nations). Many Americans have had to wake up to the realisation that the US knows far less about what is going on around the world than it has allowed people to believe.

Other leaders have deceived the world Saddam-style, or have attempted to do so, without finding their countries on the receiving end of all-out war. The punishment imposed in this case, which included indiscriminate bombing and thousands of civilian deaths, was inappropriate and disproportionate.

However imperfect it may have been thus far (and the US has played its part in any shortcomings) the world forum of sovereign nations is the right body through which to police rogue states. Better, at any rate, than the strongest nation acting unilaterally, and making up the rules as it goes along.