The danger to the US was that Saddam Hussein would have given or sold WMDs to the terrorist organizations. His was the one regiem that we knew had stockpiles of poison gas and Bio weapons and it was known that he had a nuclear program going.
kat, if you think that appeasement is the way to go, be my guest. But I don't believe you can show me ONE country where a dictator of Saddam Husseins stripe was removed through appeasement. I refer you to the Munich Accord of 1939(?) which gave the Sudetenland to the Nazis as a classic case of appeasment failure.
I never said the war would cause the Arabs to like us. I said it would make them respect us and I frankly don't give two whoops in Hell if they hate us because they have hated us all along. You just haven't seen it. Before the war, that hatred was mixed with contempt because they thought that we would not, could not sustain a war; that as soon as there were casualties, we would withdraw a'la Somalia.
They now know differently.
There was a a whine that bin Laden hasn't been caught yet.
So?
What did you expect, the whole thing wraped up in 53 minutes like Mission Imposible? Welcome to the real world. We have driven him into hiding from which he cannot be very effective and, as a by-product of the war, The Saudis have said that they will increase their efforts to trace the funding coming from the Arab world to bin Ladens terrorists.
As far as the WMDS go, we need to find scientists who worked on the things to tell us where to look. That was the problem with the Inspectors, they were simply opening doors and hoping that something would be behind them. There is one site -the Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex- where they may have found weapons grade plutonium. They don't know for sure yet. The site is so "hot" that the Hazmat suits they have on hand can't handle it. The Coalition could have cracked down hard, shot a few looters and stopped it cold. But that would have put us in the same category as Saddam Hussein in the Iraqis eyes. Better to go slow.
Regarding the school situation in Oregon and California, why is it the job of the Federal Govt. to bail out states who can't seem to keep their financial houses in order? The rules governing the use of federal money are already taking up valuable teaching time with filling out forms and covering a cretain body of work in a given time period. Never mind if the kids learn the material, just cover it so we'll continue to get our Federal funding.
Ebbie, I talk to Skeptic every day. I don't try to convince him and he doesn't try to convince me. We exchange ideas.

troll