Tom wrote:
"Or was the intent to prevent future attacks? I've seen how that rationale goes over here. How do you prove that such attacks would have taken place?"

In short: The steaming and smoking pile of rubble in NYC. They demonstrated the means, capability, intent and dedication to attack us and to continue attacking us.

Saddam also demonstrated the means, capability, intent, and dedication to use WMD on both his own people and on people of nations he was attacking. I will refrain from posting pictures. Even if we don't have hard links with Al Quaeda, his support of terrorism in general is proven, including connections to the first WTC bombing, and support of terrorism in Israel. You can make a defensible case that it isn't the same, since our job, by most strict Constitutional interpretations, is to attack only those who attack Americans, but in an interconnected world, I'm not sure we have the luxury of that outlook any more (which is where this whole "World Policeman" thread got started.) Could America stand by and watch Israel destroyed, for example? How about Taiwan? South Korea? Where do you draw the line?

You can't pile imaginary potential corpses (those saddam might have killed) next to the ACTUAL corpses of the people we DID kill in the process of the war and call the POTENTIALLY smaller pile of ACTUAL corpses the moral choice. Morality does not work that way.

Don't know about morality in general, but war sure as hell works that way. Every war in history, just or unjust, involves exactly this kind of moral calculation. Unless the outcome of the war is estimated to outweigh the cost--in wealth, lives, property, etc.--what would be the point of ANY war, no matter how just? Making these calculations is what gives leaders gray hair. Maybe someday we will be able to target people like Saddam with X-ray lasers from orbit, and the only way bystanders would ever know they are at war is the distressing tendency of their leaders to explode into a greasy smoke cloud.* But that day isn't here yet.

We judged that the over 3,000 civilians dead in Afghanistan...who are just as dead and for the most part, just as innocent as those in Iraq...were worth the outcome of disrupting an anti-American terrorist infrastructure, and the hoped-for outcome of destroying the leadership. We made similar calculations in WWII. Hell, we atom-bombed Japan. The possible lives saved from the alternative of an invasion of the Japanese mainland? Only potential. But calculatable. Whether rightly or wrongly is still debated.

*Is this really a good thing? Sounds good...and maybe a few decades of wholesale assassination will weed out some of the genes for running other people's lives. But maybe wars need to be painful. There was an old Star Trek where they came to a planet that had been at war for centuries, with computers calculating the outcome and "casualties" reporting to painless suicide chambers. James ("Screw The Prime Directive") Kirk wrecked the system, and an old-fashioned war threatened, with guns and bombs. Terrified, they made peace.

War is messy, Kirk said. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided.