If someone points a gun at a cop on a dark street, and gets his ass shot off by the cop, and it turns out to be a realistic toy gun, does this mean the cop shouldn't have shot the guy in the first place? Not a simple question, but given what the cop had to work with, few people would blame the cop.

When this happens in the real world - sometimes when the percieved "weapon" is nothing more than a cell-phone, or the Amadou Diallo case in New York where the cops reacted to the act of reaching for a wallet - the cop is usually acquitted, or often not prosecuted at all. Legal exoneration is justified on the grounds of: the available reaction time, prior training, and the atmosphere in which policemen often must work.

Plenty of people blame the cop in wrongful shootings: the victim's family and neighbors, the larger community.

Can we find any relevance in your analogy to the topic of the thread in which it was posted? The window of reaction time of the US armed forces is substantially longer than that of a beat cop. No one was seen reaching for, let alone brandishing, a possible weapon, prior to the Bush/Blair war campaign in the UN; in fact, means were already in place with a mandate to 'frisk' Iraq for weapons. A case might be made for the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon as creating an atmosphere of heightened danger, were it not for (again) the time elapsed, the absence of further attacks, or ongoing "police action" elsewhere (a.k.a. the war on terrorism).

When "innocent until proven guilty" was used as an argument against invading Iraq, Bush/Blair insisted the burden of proof was the accused's, not theirs. Now they want it the other way - of course. Whatever suits them. Rules apply to one side and not the other, then switch, because We Say So.

"Would you like jam or syrup with your waffles, sir?"