BTW, I often don't voice my opinion on the war on Iraq because I have a very hard time articulating why I feel the way I do about the war.
I have an opinion but to a lot of people it might not make a lot of sense. I would like to try to explain it though as I'm interested to hear a debate that deals with the issues I am about to raise.

I think we need to be in Iraq. And not because of WMD's or even regime change. I think we need to be in Iraq because of a number of reasons that we can not just come out and say. We needed an excuse that people would stand behind and WMD's were the excuse. Having said that, here is my opinion of why we do need to be there.

1) After 9/11, it was clear that the US needed a war. Unfortunately Afghanistan was not the "right" war. You can't blow up a country that already looks like a "mad max" movie.
--The reasone we needed a war is a little complicated but I will try to get my ideas out. The enemy we are fighting lives by a very different logic than we do. What brings about peace in many middle eastern conflicts is not "turning the cheek" which our enemy see's as a sign of weakness. What brings about peace is "retaliation". This is something the Israeli's have understood for a long time but the rest of the world does not. For example, look at how the Muslim people retaliate to "issues" against their image/people around the world.
--So we needed retaliation for 9/11 and since there was no target that was effective for the US, we needed to make one up. To show our stregnth, our willingness to fight back. Iraq was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had they not pissed off the UN weapons inspectors and had they been more receptive to inspections, maybe they would not have been attacked.

-- Now let me say this clearly. Sometimes small wars are neccessary to avert big wars. Iraq is a small war (compared to a World War) and even though small wars sometimes lead to big wars, more often than not, they prevent big wars. It is my strong belief that regardless of WMD's, Regime Change, we are in Iraq to prevent a much, much bigger impending Middle East war. Iran is much more dangerous than N. Korea and we needed military on it's borders. The people who have declared war on us, the Jihad's, they are in the Middle East and we needed a place to fight them. So Iraq became the playing field for our fight against terrorism.

So even if it's not Iraq, we need to be there somewhere. We need the retaliation or they will see us as weak and attack us even more. We unfortunately need to fight fire, with bigger fire. Yes, it's a nice idea to turn the other cheek but that will empower our enemy's to become stronger.

B

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"When two people agree on everything, one of them is not necessary" - Arliss