..invited the suspicion. And with all the UN corruption and bribery he was adept at - why should anyone in the intelligence community believe the UN inspectors? Especially with all his efforts to thwart such inspections?

To pretend that Saddam's decades of murders were preferable to the casualties of the conflict and it's potential to set up the first quasi democratic Middle Eastern nation is ridiculous.

A bloody revolution would have created many more casualties as the unarmed masses get massacred as they do in other nations where folks seek freedom. The Iraqi Kurds came to the US at the right time, with a receptive President, and were smarter than Saddam.

Let's make it very clear - we were ASKED to overthrow Saddam by a large group of native Iraqis representing a sizable portion of Iraq's population.

To FORGET this fact is so very convenient for all those who opposed "regime change" and wish to declare our effort "illegal" and that Saddam's regime was somehow anything less than a dysfunctional tyranny under which everyone, especially those of differing faiths, lived in total fear.