GIVE IT UP! THE IRAQ WAR IS NOT--AND WILL NEVER BE-- JUSTIFIED

I was arguing with a guy on the street one time about the war on Iraq. He said that even if no weapons of mass destruction are found, the war is still justified because we could not afford to "take any chances" with the Saddam Hussein regime after September, 11.

Once in for all, let us get one thing perfectly clear: just because we "can't take any chances" on a nuclear strike does not mean that we should increase the chances of a nuclear strike. Lets think for just ONE second: Suppose Saddam did have nuclear weapons and had every intention of using them against America. Now, we know for a fact that Saddam had no F-22 planes (which cannot by detected by radar) nor the launch capability to send a missile across the Atlantic, so that the best way to make a surprise nuclear strike on America would be to smuggle in mini-nukes and do a Hamas-style suicide bombing. If you wanted to hit America where it hurts, you would not use the mini-nukes on the U.S army. So, If you were Saddam and you knew six months in advance that the U.S was coming to your country with the explicit purpose of taking you from power, would you stick around or pack your bags? I thought so.

The fact that we can't find any nuclear weapons in Iraq can mean only one of two things: 1) that there were no nuclear weapons to begin with, or 2) that Saddam took the weapons with him (that is, if he had any real intention of blowing America to smithereens). Note that if case 2 is the scenario we are in, Saddam could not have had much of a weapons program, as he is able to haul it around in a suitcase. Still, a few mini-nukes can devastate a city, and getting Saddam out of the public eye is the perfect way to encourage him to further network himself into terrorist groups. Now that you've toppled him, you've given him more reason to topple you. It is no big secret why we are so desperate to catch Saddam Hussein. It is not only that we want to try him at the Hague for crimes against humanity--it's the obvious and catastrophic possibility that we may have a man on the loose with the motives and, more importantly, the means to organize a practicable nuclear strike. Now that we've killed a least over 7000 civilians (see Iraq body count on left), there will be brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, cousins, fathers, mothers, uncles and friends just lining up to be the suicide bomber that sets of the mini-nuke that will strike the U.S. and gets us all well on our way to nuclear winter.

Anyone with even a shred of imagination could have guessed that Saddam would get a face-lift, or whatever other surgical, political, and practical techniques necessary to hide his identity. We knew we weren't going to catch him--he saw us coming straight for him. If nothing else, we gave the man a world-televised 48-hour warning!--did we want him to escape or what?! I suppose you can hope that he'd turn himself over to the Hague (*spitting out a chuckle*-- ok, maybe not). It's clear that he was long gone before the first attack. God knows where those damn tapes were coming from--he could've been hiding out at Bin Laden's place (EVEN THOUGH WE KNOW DAMN WELL THAT THEY HATED EACH OTHER BEFORE WE STRUCK IRAQ. IF ANYTHING WE'VE GIVEN THEM REASON TO TEAM UP.)