I mean, really? Why should I argue?

I believe that Mr. Bush will go to war regardless of what the rest of the world says.

I think Saddam is a liar and a murderer. I think he was a liar and a murderer before, when he was our dear friend fighting Iran.

I think that, as long as there are UN inspectors traipsing all over the place, he won't try anything obvious, because that would immediately make a case for the reluctant to join the US in prosecuting a war against him.

I think it's horrible that he's being allowed to kill so many of his subjects (let's call it what it is). But I thought it was horrible that the Russians sent tanks into Prague in 1968, and I heard stories about Budapest in 1956 (I don't remember the coverage, because I was 2), and I thought the Cultural Revolution was horrible, and Pol Pot, and Tienanmen Square, and Mozambique continues to be a horror, and nobody did anything about them, either. So I guess I wonder what's so different about this. All other things being equal, when politicians get all excited about something that was formerly ignored or tolerated, I tend to view the change of heart with suspicion.

I hear about the WMD. I want to see the evidence, and not just, "We've talked to someone who we think has seen the evidence because he's afraid to talk to us." If I lived in a country ruled by a nut, I'd be afraid to talk to people he hated about the price of bubble gum.

If people want to go in there and arrest Saddam for committing crimes against humanity against human beings that happen to be living within his borders, and international agreements be damned, OK, then, quit saying we need all this other evidence. But who is going to try him? An international court whose constituting agreements we have snubbed our noses at?

And chiefly -- chiefly -- I want to know that, in this next world war (I count the Cold War as a world war), in which the ideological villains taking the star turn in the place of the Communists are the Islamic extremists, we are not the ones playing the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. I want it to be real self-defense, not a real-life version of "The Minority Report".

Best regards-- and I mean it, one American to another--
Mary Anne