Thanks Doug, and McGrath, for your posts. I don't expect everyone to agree with all that I said, but I do appreciate it when people try to rise above the insulting nature of so many of the posts in these political threads. We should expect to have differing views, and should try to learn from one another, rather than just score rhetorical points.

I didn't vote for Bush, and there is a lot about his policies that I don't care for. I am somewhat conflicted about the war in Iraq; I supported it initially, and to a large extent I still do, but I had anticipated that more evidence would be provided to support the primary rationale for the war. I keep a personal diary, and my diary entries from the period prior to the Iraq war reflect this feeling that the evidence, when it is presented in full, had better be pretty compelling, or the administration would have a lot of explaining to do. Since the evidence we have seen so far is somewhat less than compelling, we are now at the point where better explanations are needed.

I am left with the uncomfortable thought that, in the modern world, with so much depending on intelligence-gathering that can't be shared with the general public without compromising our security, we have to place a lot of trust in our leaders. Therefore it is very important that our leaders show themselves to be trustworthy, so that we will continue to support their actions even as we recognize that we don't have all the details in our hands. This is perhaps more true now that it ever was in the past, since the threats we face (a) are developed in the shadows, (b) do not depend on large-scale troop mobilizations as in years past, and (c) can be unleashed very quickly. So trust in our leaders becomes a necessary part of the equation. And trust, as we all know, has to be earned. I fear that the "trust factor" is the part that the current administration has bungled, perhaps more than any other, and this is will continue to hurt us for years to come.

On the other hand (there's always another hand), something needed to be done about Iraq; the Saddam Hussein regime was a menace to the Iraqi people and to others outside their borders, economic sanctions were only hurting the people of Iraq, and there was a continuing low-level conflict (over weapons inspections, no-fly zones, etc.) that showed no signs of abating and promised to ignite a larger powder keg sooner or later. Iraq deliberately and repeatedly reneged on their obligations prescribed by the terms of their 1991 surrender (that fact alone was a sufficient basis for regime change, in my view), the UN was completely ineffectual at calling them to account, and the US couldn't just maintain huge troop deployments on Iraq's borders indefinitely in the hopes of coercing compliance. And most people who were in a position to know believed that they were continuing to pursue nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons, in order to better enable them to resist the demands of the international community. So I continue to ask the question: if we had NOT gone to war in Iraq, what (beyond endless talk and ineffective economic sanctions) should we have done?

Thanks again to those of you who have attempted to elevate the discussion. -- WS