Okay, your original statement was:

...that one should have a damn bloody good reason for the justifying of the deaths of thousands of people on both sides - especially when that person themselves, or their close ones, are not the ones directly involved.

This kind of falls into the "duh!" category. The kicker is what is a damn bloody good reason, and how do you decide that?

We've established on this board over the months that even the opponents to the war in Iraq have a point where war is considered defensible. An easy example would be a direct attack on America, like 9/11. It is certainly true that Iraq has not directly attacked America. Others claim that real evidence of WMD development would have been sufficient. I have not heard from them how they would feel about attacking Iran, currently enthusiastically building atomic weapons for the annihilation of Israel while the United Nations threatens them with the possibility of stern disapproval.

Where it gets tough is when you would really like to settle things before an American city is burning. Bush's "pre-emptive" strike, based on information in hand at the time, was the major controversy behind this war. Having suffered a deadly surprise attack by another nation understandably lowered the bar a bit for the philosophy of pre-emptive warfare.

It used to be that conventional warfare methods made such decisions easier. Troops lining up on a border, movements of tanks and planes, and other things like that would signal a possible need for a pre-emptive attack in a much more obvious manner. In a world of secret weapons programs, and pipelines to terrorists, the flags aren't that easy to see any more.

While history is now being enthusiastically rewritten to make it sound like EVERYBODY knew all the time that Saddam was just a harmless old man who would never have harmed a fly if left under the stern control of the United Nations*, it wasn't all that cut-and-dried back when the decision to go to war was made.

Nor was it true that the WMD was the only issue involved, although the history is being rewritten on that, too. Saddam's long and extensive proven history of actually doing, over and over again, exactly what Bush was afraid he would do in the future, has also been conveniently forgotten. To listen to some people on this board, you'd think we'd invaded frigging Switzerland.

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*See again, Iran, Libya, Sudan, etc. etc.