This keeps being said, yet somehow when I ask what the alternatives were, things get very quiet. Or incoherent.

Let the U.N. keep Saddam under control? How well is that working with Iran? Were tens of thousands of American troops going to stay off Iraq's borders forever?

Keep the sanctions on? How many people was that killing every year?

Oil for Food? They're still digging into the U.N.'s corruption on that.

No Fly Zones? What, forever?

Get the Iraqis to rebel against Saddam? Would those currently screaming about "civil war" and its consequences like to think that through for a few minutes?

Periodically, we go through spasms of this argument, and usually the anti-war faction finally yells out "it isn't OUR job to come up with solutions!"

I'm sorry, but Iraq was not a perpetually stable situation, and if Bush hadn't gone in, I guarantee one of his successors eventually would have had to. It wasn't Bush who first announced a policy of regime change over there.

Right now we have a similar situation going on in Iran. Only the most naive idiots think Iran isn't enthusiastically pursuing nuclear weapons. The U.N. and Europe are doing all the right things, making all the right moves, having all the right meetings, and issuing all the right proclamations. So far, it's been accomplishing jack shit.

If there's one thing that has always characterized the Left regarding serious issues of national security, it's absolute impotence. The $64,000 question, of course, is whether or not that's any better than incompetence.