You seem to have a cognitive block, Mark... permit me to attempt to enlighten you with the following precis for the position taken by opponents of America's recent conduct outside its borders.
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1. Previous evidence of Iraq's possession of WMD - especially chemical weapons - came through his use thereof against Iran, the Kurds and the (so-called) "Marsh Arabs". The result of the latter two uses were the "No Fly Zones" (since the delivery system for those weapons seemed to be exclusively airborne). We supported his poisoning of the Iranian army.

2. No such weapons appear to have been used against Coalition forces in Gulf War One. Stockpiles discovered in the wake of GW One were rendered useless by one method or another, according to the UN inspectors.

3. Like many other sovereign nations, Iraq resented the presence of an international team of snoops. (Think of GWB allowing inspections of *our* CB&N weapons and facilities...) Like many other belligerent dictators, Saddam wished to appear much stronger than GW One actually left him (or, looked at slightly differently: he wanted his neighbors, friend and foe alike, to think he had not lost). Tossing the inspectors out kills both birds with the same stone.

4. Iraq, throroughly weakened by GW One and the embargo, was considered easy pickin's by GWB and his advisors, who (variously) either wanted revenge for Daddy's misstep in calling off GW One too soon - a common reaction in the US - or simply another quick victory in the "War on Terrorism". [Tactically, Iraq was easy pickin's, but tactics are not strategy - a lesson lost on, apparently, both Bushes.]

5. To "justify" Gulf War Two - which was going to happen, regardless - the Bush Admin relied on [a] an interpretation of Saddam's expulsion of the inspectors to mean that he still had, or was re-developing, WMD (again, specifically chem and bio); an unfounded belief that Saddam was "connected to" Islamist extremist extra-national terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda; [c] questionable intelligence (in all senses of that word) regarding certain import purchases badly misinterpreted as a clandestine nuclear program.

NOTE: Saddam's behavior against "his own people" - that is, Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs who he did not consider to be "his own people", even though they lived within the borders of Iraq - was used (by the US) as a justification only in afterthought. So was the grand notion of "liberating" the Iraqis from the worst despot since Pol Pot. [It has always been my contention, expressed more than once in this forum, that those two reasons were morally sufficient, and might have been persuasive enough (delivered by the right speakers) at the UN that there would have been a "coalition" wider than two countries to engage in GW Two... however, that was demonstrably [b]not the Bush Admin's thinking.]

6. At the equivalent of gunpoint, Saddam renewed permission for inspections. They found nothing. Bush and Cronies insisted this was because the weapons were hidden and the inspection was a waste of time. By that time, troops were already being moved into the theater under the laughable disguise of "training" (see: Central Command's forward HQ in Qatar, for instance). No one with more than half a brain believed the war was anything less than inevitable... and they were right.

7. Post-Gulf War Two: notwithstanding the total lack of a coherent plan for nation-rebuilding (see also: Afghanistan), the allegations upon which the war was engaged have so far proven baseless. The longer reality refutes the allegations, the more desperately the invaders attempt to rewrite what they claim to have said before. Meanwhile, they have conquered the land but not pacified its people.

Now - here's the part you have the most trouble with: we have dealt with a sovereign nation in ways our laws do not permit us to treat with a suspected criminal. We preach our Rule of Law as a universal Truth, but do not practice it in the international community. We appear thereby to be the worst of hypocrites. No matter how loudly the Bush Admin insists otherwise, their actions - on our behalf - speak far louder and more definitively than their words. In this thread, you have fallen back to a position that the laws in one "jurisdiction" do not apply to the other; thus, our behavior need not. What you are apparently blind to is the higher principle.

Your stance, and that of many others in this forum, is therefore no different from moral relativism. The hypocrisy continues, considering how many of those same people pay lip service to moral absolutism as long as the phrase serves their immediate purpose.

More than once, I've applied this phrase, familiar to True Believers in UFOs, to the Bush Admin and their behavior regarding Iraq: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". People of that sort conclude that a conspiracy is deliberately withholding evidence they know must exist. We all have ridiculed this illogic (and similar applications regarding the nature of Mars, or the incidence of meteoric impact) on the Space Board, yet so many who deride it there accept it without question from their current Government.

Perhaps someday I'll understand why.