In Iraq we were never justified morally (claiming self defense even stipulating WMD) and it seems that even our flawed putative justifications were fantasies.

This is kind of interesting. I get the impression that even if we had located tons of nerve gas and a load of nuclear warheads under construction, that it would still make no difference to you since, short of omniscience, or an actual nuclear attack on a city, there would be no way of absolutely proving he would ever have given these weapons to terrorists to use on us in the future. Just like there is no absolute proof that Saddam and Sons would have killed additional Iraqis in the next thirty years. Heck, there's no absolute proof that if Hitler had conquered Russia and England, that he wouldn't have left the Jews there completely alone. I guess we'll never know. If you really think this way, I hope you're not in charge of anything really important.

It's kind of funny. Before the Iraq war the Left was harping on Bush's failure to interpret the scattered clues and intelligence data to predict that the terrorists were going to fly airplanes into buildings. Nothing that was available as intelligence before 9/11 was absolute proof that someone was going to fly commericial airplanes into buildings. Had the FBI arrested these people for the crime of taking flight lessons, then what? Unless they had their plans written out in detail, what would be the evidence?

Hindsight is always 20/20.