Saddam was not a pickpocket, or someone who just committed a first offense. He did not shoot a bank guard during a robbery. He was not fingered by genetics.

Saddam Hussein and his sons have, over the past decades, murdered hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise probably be alive today. Mass graves. Institutionalized torture. Deliberate starvation. Invasion of his neighbors. Annihilation of a population's ecosystem. The nerve gassing of entire villages.

People like you fascinate me. Exactly what the living hell does someone have to do before you can decide that he has made evil a full-time career?

We didn't set out to kill 10,000 people (I notice your number keeps expanding). We didn't set out to kill anyone. Saddam could have ended this any time he wanted to before the fact. Where were the protest signs calling for Saddam to step down? To do one damn thing to keep the peace? Did I just miss them among the thousands calling Bush the worst monster ever to walk the face of the Earth?

Your argument is completely false in the sense as we don't KNOW yet if Iraq will be a safer, better place. We could leave, we could be whipped out of Iraq by geurilla warfare, or another regional confict erupting elsewhere (Korea, China, Russia). A dictator could ooze on in from the wings that could make Saddam look like playmate of the year. Any number of things COULD happen.

This is a reeking load of your usual logical horseshit. Hey, an asteroid could hit Baghdad tomorrow, too. I have no PROOF it won't. Sell it to someone who buys this kind of thinking.

The hard fact is that if we had done what you thought we should have, Saddam and Sons would still be in power, and we KNOW how they treated their people. Is there any rational reason for assuming that would have changed? At least now the country of Iraq has a chance. Your way, they would have had none.