Bush had to go into Afghanistan for purely tactical reasons: Retaliation against Al-Quaeda for 9/11 and the Taliban for sheltering them. There were no valid "Yankee Imperialist" reasons for doing so, we had the moral high ground. It was a war the American people supported and the international community could understand. I supported Mr Bush in this effort, as I supported his father in Iraq I.

Iraq II was discretionary, optional, not even preemptive, fought for strategic reasons and with a strong economic component (oil and control of the Straits, plus intimidation of all the states bordering that country, by an American puppet regime installed under the guise of "freedom". We know now that plans were being made even before 9/11 to take out Saddam; all we lacked was an excuse.

But neither our allies nor the American public saw it as necessary in order to punish the terrorists who attacked us first. Only the WMD justification could sway the US people to fight this war, an excuse the international community never bought into.

Whether the evidence of WMDs was a result of bad intelligence, self-deception and wishful thinking, or deliberate fabrication is debatable, but there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to persuade me it was the latter. The failure to find those weapons is the reason no one, foreign or domestic, believes Obama about the need to punish Syria for its NBC activities. Among the other unanticipated consequences, and probably the worst and most long-lasting, of Iraq, was the loss of US credibility, and the moral high ground.

Nations have the right, even the obligation, to defend themselves, and to retaliate against attack. Invading a country for strategic and economic reasons is aggression, pure and simple. Its the sort of thing we used to condemn the Russians and Chinese for even preparing for.