All that proves, pdq, is that when a superpower wants excuses to launch an unprovoked, illegal, and completely unnecessary war against an impoverished and almost helpless country that has a lot of oil.....it will find them. The excuses, I mean.

Adolf Hitler always had excuses for doing stuff like that too. And so has every great power that was bent on committing aggression.

The people who support the aggression are the ones who believe the excuses, and such people are numerous....within the borders of the aggressor country....usually not very numerous elsewhere.

Do you know how many nations have far, far better excuses for making war on the USA? Many, many nations. The reason they don't do it is simple: the weak in this world are not generally so foolish as to start a fight they cannot win. They'll only do it if they reach the point of desperation.

It is the strong, the mighty who launch wars of choice. They do it because they know they can win (in terms of the conventional warfare at least...maybe not in the longer term that follows it). The USA fought a war of choice in Iraq in 2003, not a war that was in any way necessary, good, honest, or just. The USA is an aggressor nation and should be on trial in the World Court for invading Iraq, and should have to get out of that country at once, and pay them billions of dollars in reparations for the damage done and the lives lost.

That was what Dennis Kucinich had in mind, because he's an honest and truthful man. Such a truthful man as Dennis Kucinich has no chance of being elected president in the USA, and is lucky to even be able to stay alive. He's like Don Quixote in the USA...but the corporate windmills he tilts against are very, very real.

Obama's interesting. I think he's a pragmatic man with quite progressive intentions. Being pragmatic, he knows he can only go so far speaking out against past policy and still have any chance of being accepted by the ruling establishment in the USA. He's commanding an imperial nation that sees itself as fully entitled to dominate the world, and he must work within the imperial design. He cannot afford to voice certain truths about that publicly. What I wonder is...does he know them? I think he may. We'll have to wait and see what he does.

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The record, by the way, shows that Saddam was more frightened of Iran than of the USA. He wanted to give Iran the impression he had WMDs so that it would serve as a deterrent to an Iranian attack on Iraq.

That is why any smaller power wants WMDs. It wants them to deter larger powers from attacking it. That's quite understandable. If your neighbours were out to get you in the Old West and they were heavily armed, what would you do about it? You'd arm yourself in a similar fashion. If you didn't do so, then you had no hope of protecting yourself...your lack of weapons would be the key to your own destruction. That is why smaller powers want the Bomb. They want it as a deterrent, because the world in general is lawless, just like the Wild West was.

It is lawless because the most powerful (internationally or regionally speaking), such as the USA, Israel, and Russia, simply attack the weaker powers whenever they wish to, however they wish to, whether it's "legal" or not, upon whatever excuse suits them, and they do it because they know that no one can or will stop them from doing it.

That's how bandits behave. Aggressor nations are bandits.

Iraq was promoted by the West AS an aggressor nation when it attacked Iran back in the 80s, and the West helped supply the Iraqis, but Iran won that war anyway. Iraq was no longer useful to the West after that, so Saddam began to become officially "a bad guy" in the western media. His downfall was not far off...and the American ambassador helped hasten it by assuring him in 1991 that the USA would take no sides in a war between Iraq and Kuwait. Clever move! He took the bait, and from that moment on his fate was sealed.