The point is, on the other hand, do we then have the right to wage war upon a people because their leader is not legitimate. Obviously, Saddam himself was not the immediate target of the vast majority the millions of tonnes of ordinance expended in the war in Iraq.

I think many would say that the appropriate metaphor here is raping the people in question to restore their chastity. Its an irrational and nonsnsical approach to the problem "Leader X is illegitimate". What makes Leder X illegitimate, after all, is the use of force to impose his will upon the people- regardless of the will of the people.

Note the blurring of the concept of the use of force, regardless of motivation or ends of the user. Coalition troops and Saddam's thugs are identically illegitimate, because they both use force.

We did not expend our munitions primarily on civilians, as Davin well knows. We have lost many Americans to keep from killing Iraqi civilians.

We killed a grand total of about 5,000 non-combatants to liberate twenty million people from a regime, that over its twenty-five years, killed an average of 140 Iraqis a day. By this calculation, we broke even back in April. Of course, the anti-war people insist that there is no proof that Saddam would ever have killed anyone in the future, so this is not relevant to them. These same people believe that another forty years of tyranny, restrained only by angry letters from the U.N., bumbling inspectors, and totally useless sanctions, would not have resulted in any danger to the rest of the world.

By Davin's standards, it seems that one could not liberate a people from a tyranny unless they first voted to have you do it (while under the control of that tyranny.)

To a large degree, though, this argument stands as a value laden red herring for the real justification of this war. As I have pointed out before: the argument 'we should invade because leader X is a tyrant' is a purely values-based argument that's validity and appeal, in the end, boils down to what ethical/moral premises you accept. This is not to say that its relative- but it is to say that a roomfull of rational folks can disagree about about its truth/falsity until the end of time.

Only leftists can use the word "values" as a pejorative. There are reasons for this, which I won't go into right now.

Of COURSE Davin is saying it's "relative." How else does one interpret this paragraph? And please find me a single rational person, let alone a roomful of them, that would not agree that Saddam was a tyrant. For sure, I could find some irrational people who would say something along the lines of "who am I to decide?" but the reasons for that are also another story.

In general, I think wise folks understand that these are exactly the sort of reasons that one should NOT go to war for. You should be factually 100% objectively CERTAIN before you take lives, especially on the scale war involves.

No war in human existence was ever undertaken on 100 percent certainty. Or any other endeavor for that matter. It is certainly impossible to obtain 100 percent accurate intelligence information. One can make a legitimate argument that the percentage Bush went ahead on was too low, but 100 percent is ridiculous.

However, as a tool of distraction, it is marvelous. All those responsible for this war have to do is to convince their followers to shift the debate into this swamp of non-reason, value and emotion and you can hide, forever, the fact that the original argument presented for this war was false: That saddam had WMD, that Iraq had ties with Al-Qaeda, and that Saddam was an immediate threat to the US and her allies. We therefore must invade.

This is a misstatement. The truth is that we thought Saddam had WMD and ties with terrorism (not necessarily al-Qaeda specifically), and that this combination was too dangerous to be allowed to become an immediate threat. Is this a new approach? Maybe so. The whole point of the concept of "pre-emption" is that the enemy is NOT attacking you at that time, but presents a future danger. You can't accuse Bush both of describing Iraq as an immediate threat AND of engaging in pre-emptive war. The two ideas don't mesh.

There was ample evidence, before the war, that this argument had false premises. There was ample argument that the conclusion did not follow. There was ample empirical evidence everywhere that we should not act as we did. There was ample data about the costs, and the differences between the real and the claimed costs. There was ample data about (shall I go on?).

McFly, I suggest you go back to accounts from before the war, particularly from the anti-war people. I can provide links if necessary. The myth that "everyone knew" what we would find in Iraq is being painted over what actually occurred back then, and what predictions were actually made. Fortunately, it's getting a lot harder in this day of archives to rewrite history.

That, McFly, I think is where the left is coming from- NOT the legitimization of the rule of dictators, but questioning our moral grounds for making war on a people because their leader is a scum bag.

The Left is coming from a single direction: the political destruction of George W. Bush. Iraq is just the most effective tool they can use right now. The fact that most Democratic politicians currently spouting the "no war" party line were enthusiastically in favor of military regime change in Iraq back in the late 1990s, and for exactly the same reasons Bush gave, proves this if nothing else does. I will concede that Davin has been a lot more consistent than that, but then he isn't running for office to run my country either.

And of course, at the bottom of all the fuss, is one single, clear fact:

If we had done things the way the Left had wanted, Saddam and his sons would still be ruling Iraq.