Very well said, Linda! Except for one thing - "I don't believe we should go to war because it would involve the destruction of the lives of innocent people".

A million or so 'innocent people' are estimated to have died as the result of sanctions over the last 12 years. Not the fault of the sanctions, but of the way the existing regime applies them to it's own people.

I'm fed up with the bleating of the peacniks who offer nothing but moral outrage at the thought of going to war. Innocent people are dying in Iraq every day, & have been ever since Bush Sr botched the last Gulf War. If you leave sanctions in place, innocent people will still keep dying. If you take sanctions away, do you think they're going to stop dying? Or do you think Saddam will go back to happily massacring his countrymen?

The only way the 'innocents' are going to stop dying is if you take away the regime that's been killing them for the last 30+ years. Blair may well be a lying sack of shit (he is a politician, after all), Bush ditto in spades. I'm not looking forward to the idea of a war (it's not the war that worries me so much as America screwing up the aftermath big-time), but, sadly, I can't see a single other solution.

It may well be that the real reason for the war is not justice, not security, nor anything but the desire of Bush & his cronies to get their grubby hands on Iraq's oil. If so, we may be going to war for the wrong reasons, but at least we'll do the right thing.

In all the bleatings of the peace brigade, I've yet to hear a single solution that will stop all these 'deaths of the innocent' that seem suddenly to prey on everyone's minds. A pity it's taken 12 years & more for most of the protestors to wake up to all the deaths. A pity that 6 months after the fuss has died down (assuming we don't go to war) most of the self-same protestors will have forgotten about the thousands more deaths that will have occurred as result of not changing the regime, having moved on to their next crusade & bout of moral outrage...

Yours, cynically! :(