Polls and all the other freedoms that come along with speaking free, without reprisals, which Iraqis now enjoy.

Even the 3 percent that amounts the Iraqi imports is consumed. That's a huge amount of oil even if as a percentage of gross consumption it's small.

The analogy is a simple one. If 10 people buy bread from a bakery, and the bakery has enough dough to provide for them the price stays low. If the bakery suddenly can only provide for 9 people and that tenth has to go to another bakery, ALL the bakeries can now raise the price of bread because supply no longer meets demand.

At first the bakeries will charge a little more for the bread, but soon thereafter when they get organized (like the gas companies) they will be able to ask whatever price they want and that the people can pay. If every bakery has the same price, the bakers realize they ALL will get rich because folks will still go to their local bakery and simply pay more.

That 3 percent, if gone, would simply exacerbate the problem and oil companies would be able to say that they simply can't meet demands with the current supply. Since they are an effectively united monopoly, shielded from serious foreign competition, we all would pay whatever price they want to conjure up. In this case we are paying 4.00 a gallon when only a months ago it was 2.50 a gallon. $5.00, $7.00 or $11.00 - whatever arbitrary price they conjure up is what will be paid.

As for WMD in Iraq - they did produce them. They had a gas factory and had dabbled in WMD in the past as recently as 1993. With the vast UN corruption and deception which was going on up until the moment when we attacked, it only made sense that the intelligence reports noticed irregularities in shipments of goods, oil and financial irregularities that permitted Saddam to rebuild his military at lightning speed after 1991.

Or put in an easier to understand analogy - it takes absolutely no imagination to suspect that a former meth maker looks very suspicious when he buys a bunch of chemicals from the local supermarket and boards up the windows of his house and is known to take potshots at passing police cars.

Saddam was in the exact same boat. That he successfully bribed our "allies" with cheap oil for "protection" in the UN is now common knowledge. Once the meth house has been razed, gangs may take over the land and play in the rubble, but the bigger threat has been eliminated. That folks still believe he or his government was preferable to what the world has now in Iraq is beyond naive and is akin to preferring the likes of Idi Amin and other "strongmen" who rule their nations and people corruptly at the point of a gun over an unstable quasi-democracy.

I'll take the unstable quasi-democracy anyday.