OK. Saddam's a bad guy!! Wouldn't want my sister dating him. Or my brother, come to think of it, but not being gay he wouldn't like it either. A very bad guy. Reading how he treats his own people is disgusting!! And, there's no widely disseminated credible information he's promoted anything lately against the US of which I'm aware. Some things the gov't has hinted at, but it pretty well tells us what it knows when it wants badly to sway public opinion. I wonder why the US is so interested in going after him right now.

Because he's bad toward the Kurds? So are the Turks. And in Africa there are recent genocides with numbers of people on the order of the Holocaust millions. We could help more people, faster, there than anywhere, if it's a humanitarian thing. In Argentina and Chile hundreds and thousands of people have been "disappeared" for political reasons. Why not go after them?

Because he's a bad guy and might be capable of building weapons of mass destruction? Well, South Africa can do that, and they haven't been kind to civil rights advocates. So can North Korea, not exactly a model of civil rights. Russia has WMD, and their record is less than sterling. Argentina and Chile could build anything they wanted. China ain't great, either, and it demonstrably has WMD. Ghadaffi in Libya ain't a sweetheart by US standards, either, and can buy anything he really wants.

It just seems odd that there are worse folks in Africa, there are others who have or could have every conceivable WMD, and American public opinion is being marshalled against Iraq. There's a reason why the matter of the missing American pilot is being raised now, and not when they first suspected he had been captured alive. (Why would the Iraqi's hold him, and not tell the US? Doesn't make sense, but they may have.)

Unless. The only thing that makes sense to me is that in the back of their minds Bush and Cheney are aware that there is oil in Iraq which might be more easily available to American interests if they could destabilize Iraq. I think Bush and Cheney are quite sensitive to the interests of oil companies.

And, why is it sometimes considered un-American to question US foreign policy and/or practices, and not considered un-American to resent paying the taxes which keep the country going? Why can being critical of foreign policy or practices be regarded as almost traitorous, but being hostile toward the same government's domestic policies isn't regarded as being anti-America. Talk about Mysteries of the Universe.

None of this is to say Saddam ain't a badguy. It is to suggest that, based upon incomplete information, true, if the US interest is humanitarian there are easier places to help more people, and if its terrorism, there are other places with WMD, too.

Arf