Again, not what I'm advocating. Keep him in a little box until and if he does something that *actually* justifies military action. Its worked for more than a decade, hasn't it? Sure, its expensive, but so will war and reconstruction.

Are you including the cost of 9/11 in your computation. Are you including that fact that the US is left in the position of being blamed for the fate of poor people in Iraq? It's hard to argue the merits, especially when your position is that free trade is the way to a better world.
Another really basic point; one I don't even you can understand: the US is paying these costs, don't you think that this gives the US a certain "right" to decide what alternative ways it acheive it's objective?
It seems to me that if other countries wanted to be entitled a say in the matter they would be spending money to support it. Now even it they were spending money it wouldn't really alter the US right to do what it thought was in there security interest, but it would lend some creditable is these other countries objections. As it stands these countries are not taking any responsiblity rather they are active in opposistion- subvertively working against sanctions and taking "bribes" in term of taking Saddem sweet deals (which are of course intended to encourage the ending of sanctions.

Also are you including in these costs the upside of regime change. How much is the freedom of tens of millions of people worth? What is it worth to the US, to be seen by the Muslim world as a world Power which not only has the courage to make the hard choices, but also it willing to take these hard choices which are favorable to Muslim interests.

Also some people are eager to point out that the US has *some* responsiblity for supporting the current Iraq regime, strangely they then flip around claiming the US has no responsibility towards Iraq. In other words they want to beat us with the responsiblity stick (blame us) then object to the US actually taking responsibility. The only correct solution in this strange world view is for no action to be taken at all. Oh, you are suppose to be "supportive" by talk of wonderful things and "promise" things you can't possible deliver, but for heaven sakes don't actually *do* anything. Frontier America made us a nation that valued action over words. The day America is unwilling to change the world is the day America declines as the world power (and joins the decadent "Old Europe Club"). Of course, this is a very liberal (small "L") concept, which the Conservative Repubican are pushing and the conservative (small "C")Democrats are fighting like mad. [And this isn't about Bush, this has been going on for decades].