Czuch:

> Its just that many people, myself included, believe that those numbers pale
> in comparison to the death toll had nothing been done....

I agree with you in this. I think there are few people out there who will think that Saddam Hussain was harmless. He was dangerous, not to the US, but to his neighbors and to the Iraqi people.

I know that on the surface it might seem that I am constantly pointing the finger at the US. In reality I see the war in Iraq as a continuation of the same political and economic conditions that have determined human history going back to antiquity and ancient empires.

I think the big difference between the war in Iraq and other wars is that this war was fought in the public eye through telesion, the Internet and other means of communication.

We question the motivation of the war because many details of foreign policy, business interests and military intelligence became visible to the public.

The Bush administration chose to fight the war in the public eye and to mount a massive propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the American public and the world that the war was justified. I think the Bush administration made two mistakes in the public relations campaign preceding the war:

First, they chose to believe faulty (or manufactured?) intelligence that could not be corroborated before the war.

Second, they lost patience with the UN's lack of decisiveness and resolve.

If the Bush administration had chosen its intelligence more carefully and allowed the UN to come around and support the war, then the public view of the war would be different.

The Bush administration gambled that WMDs were there and that once Saddam was defeated the WMDs would be found and the war would be fully justified. They called Saddam's bluff, and then found themselves with no evidence of WMDs.

A lack of a proper exit strategy, together with a total lack of vision with regards to iraqs internal ethnic makeup, led to sectarian violence and insurgency.

Dubious business connections, conflicts of interest, corruption in reconstruction efforts and other questionable business connections have made a lot of people question the motivation behind the war.

The honest truth is that I personally have mixed feelings about it. Saddam was an early ally, and later a mortal enemy of the US. Lots of people have died, been wounded, become homeless, etc. Those things make me see the war (and every other war) as a bad thing, but removing Saddam was certainly the right thing to do.