A major rationale for this war was that Saddam possessed the proven capacity for building weapons of mass destruction, had built large quantities of them, and probably had existing stockpiles of chemical and biological ones.

And that given his past behavior and policies, would be very likely to pass them along to chosen terror groups, or use them again himself.

Given the assumption that these stockpiles DID exist, since the terrorists cannot very well run off now with weapons that were never there, you have to convince me that leaving Saddam in power was a better solution, and that somehow these stockpiles would never have found their way to terror groups or hostile nations.

The U.N. example I gave is germane because the U.N. is continously invoked as the solution that would have kept Saddam in check, and his weapons (if any) out the hands of terrorists in perpetuity. In point of fact, the U.N. inspectors have screwed up royally over and over again, including missing the second nuclear weapons program in Iraq (before the Gulf War,) missing Libya's WMD program, missing much of what North Korea was doing, and missing the Pakistan nuke ring. Naturally, we have no idea what they may have missed that we don't know about, but that's meaningless speculation.

As I type this, Iran is cheerfully building bombs under the U.N.'s nose, knowing damn well there's nothing they can or will do about it.

But the U.N. would have restrained Saddam for the next thirty years. Right.