Chris,

Here's what it all boils down to...

The U.S. and the U.K. insisted to the rest of the world that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that posed an immediate threat to the security of the free world AND that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups and so posed a clear and present danger to freedom-loving people throughout the world.
Despite the protestations of many countries the U.K. and U.S. and Australia and Poland declared war on Iraq in order to prevent those WMD from ever being used and in order to ensure that terrorist support was no longer forthcoming from the Iraqi government. That caused the loss of thousands of lives and the maiming of thousands of lives and the introduction of chaos to millions of Iraqi citizens.

Now, long after the war ended, there has been no connection made to any terrorist group that is endangering the free world and NO WMD ARE IN SIGHT.

The U.S. government, aided and abetted by the U.S. media, has successfully shifted reasoning for the war from that of preserving world security to one of ridding Iraq of a cruel dictator in the minds of a good majority of the American public.

That is not so in the rest of the world!
The rest of the world took the U.S. and the U.K. at their word and no amount of hindsight/fact-twisting/liberal-interpretation of U.N. or CIA or MI5 or CENTCOM or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or President Bush report/statements/speeches is going to change that.
In fact it is only serving to dramatically diminish the esteem of the U.S. and the U.K. through the world while at the same time increasing the perception through the world that the U.S. is a danger to peace and security on this planet.
That the U.S. and U.K. misstated the level of danger in now clear to the world. At least the finding of WMD in reasonable quantity and in useable form will help, but only by showing that there was not outright lying going on but permitting the plausible argument that there was only misjudgement involved.


>>Chris
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>>I'm not sure how inspectors are supposed to "verify" whether Iraq has proscribed weapons, unless they look and find a few. This is a barn-door-sized obvious fact.
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>Maybe it would help if you read what a former inspector had to say about it:
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>http://www.useu.be/Categories/GlobalAffairs/Iraq/Jan1903IraqSmokingGunKay.html
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>>Why ask me what happened to the WMD? You were the one claiming there was mountains of the stuff not long ago. Now there isn't a speck to be found. That is something YOU need to explain, not me. Do you think that the cache of vacuum cleaners that the searchers *did* manage to find, might have something to do with it?
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>It's not me claiming there was mountains of stuff... it's Hans Blix and the U.N. And no, it's not me who has to explain what happened to it. It was Saddam Hussein, who offered no proof whatsoever. That is what Hans Blix said, not me.
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>>re chamberlain; your slogans ignore that fact that when Hitler claimed the Rhineland and the artificially created Czechoslovakia, public opinion in France and Britain would not have allowed taking of arms in another european war for which neither country was prepared. Plus there was public sympathy in France, Britain and (dare I say it) USA for Germany's breaches of certain onerous Versailles declarations. I wonder how you factor Hitler's pact with Stalin into your equation? And so it goes on.
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>The point wasn't that people weren't prepared to fight. It was the fact that Chamberlain accepted Hitler's word for it, rather than looking at his actions. Stalin's pact with Hitler is further example of listening to a person's words rather than their actions. Wasn't it clear that Hitler was going to break the non-agression pact at some point?