This point is rather irritating to me, however;

For all the right-wing nutjobs saying that liberal media is destroying our way of life, perhaps you should re-evaluate your way of life and welcome yourself to the modern world.

Actually authoritarianism is leftist. Ideological Leftism is seen as a desire for constant change that is motivated in most instances by strong ego needs — principally needs for attention, power and excitement. Leftists generally gain satisfaction of these needs by advocating equality of various sorts and by proposing that an ever-increasing government role in society is needed to ensure equality. This enthusiasm for imposing an ever-widening nimbus of government regulation on all human activity is quintessentially authoritarian. Conservatives, by contrast, are primarily motivated by a desire for individual liberty and a concomitant dislike of government activism so are quintessentially anti-authoritarian.

The old (and might I add outdated) equation of conservatism is that conservatives have a love of the status quo and a dislike of change and new arrangements. Whether one advocates change or not simply reflects whether or not one is satisfied with the existing arrangements. People today on the right will advocate change in order to tear down welfare and liberate business, or restructure the tax code, while Leftists will advocate change to extend welfare and restrict big business. The status quo, then, no longer has any role in defining one particular side of politics.

Many people think this statement appears in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution and therefore must be strictly enforced. However, the words: “separation”, “church”, and “state” do not even appear in the first amendment. The first amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The statement about a wall of separation between church and state was made in a letter on January 1, 1802, by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut.

Yes, I know what a theocracy is. DO YOU? I think this piece of information that you put into this discussion is not only irrelevant but is somewhat disengenuous, considering that American law is based on the Mosaic law. This is the reason that the ten commandments are posted in and around our courts.

A theocracy is a place where sharia law rules, not the Bible.

The United States isn’t a “theocracy”, although it’s founded on biblical principles….it’s a leftist argument to use terrorism/Islamic states as the example why Christians should hide their faith in public, but that doesn’t really make any sense when a rational person puts that under the magnifying glass.

First, I’ve observed that you have an unusual combination of leftist arguments and attitudes that I agree with in this comment. I find that curious. I also find it curious when you say that my country lied about wmd.

As for the rationale for the war; the United States does not go to war to enforce all UN Security Council Resolutions. It did not for example go to war to enforce the first 16 UN Security Council Resolutions on Iraq, though it would have been fully justified in doing so. We did, however, fly daily military missions over the Iraq no-fly zones in an attempt to enforce the clauses in those resolutions that forbade Saddam Hussein from using poison gas on the Kurds again because we knew that without a military invasion of Iraq’s air space, diplomatic means alone could not prevent a monster like Saddam Hussein from doing just that. President Clinton did fire 450 cruise missiles into Iraq in a futile military invasion (futile because we needed a force on the ground to make it work) designed to compel Saddam to honor the inspection clauses of the 16 Resolutions. He did this in 1998 after Saddam threw the inspectors out. So in a sense we had been going to war over the Iraq UN resolutions for more than a decade prior to 2003 – something critics never mention.

We finally sent a ground force into Iraq over UN Security Council Resolution 1441 – the 17th UN resolution – because this was explicitly a war ultimatum. It said to Saddam: Comply with the terms of this resolution by December 7, 2002 or else. The Saddam regime did not comply. This is the view of chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and not just the United States, Britain and their allies, and all of these facts support the President’s position that the Saddam regime could not be made to observe the truce agreements of the Gulf War and the 16 UN resolutions without the use of military force.

Every move that Saddam did make to comply with the UN Resolutions was out of fear of American military reprisal and was part of a strategy designed to confuse the well-meaning political elements in the West and inspire to malign ones to his advantage. Thus when he thought he could get away with it during the Clinton Administration, Saddam expelled the UN inspectors. The Bush Administration began sending clear signals in January 2002 that it meant business and that if Saddam did not comply he would be taken down. In June the President made a speech at West Point that was widely reported as a signal the United States was preparing for war. In the next months he began a military buildup in the Middle East. Then and only then did Saddam invite the inspectors back into Iraq. But he put restrictions on them so they could not adequately do their job. This was a violation itself of the truce agreements and the UN Resolutions. But Saddam knew his half concession would be enough to mobilize the credulous, the appeasers and the enemies of the West in the western countries themselves to escalate their efforts to tie America’s hands (by rejecting the military option). One of the main causes of the war in Iraq was the misnamed “peace movement” itself which made Saddam believe that American threats were idle and that the United States would never live up to its word.

The UN Security Council refused to enforce its own resolution. Why? Because the Soviet Union, France and China were all allies of the Saddam dictatorship and had veto power over Security Council resolutions. They approved the war ultimatum because they knew they could veto the actual use of force. They were the Saddam regime’s military suppliers and thus complicit in his crimes (France had even built his nuclear reactor) and they were on the receiving ends of hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and promised oil contracts.

This war was was about enforcing international law (which is disturbing to me) and legitimizing the UN (which is also disturbing) – and more particularly and importantly in my opinion – showing that when America speaks, she means what she says. Why is this important? Because the next rogue regime – Iran, Syria, perhaps one day Pakistan – needs to know this so it doesn’t make the mistake that Afghanistan did of attacking us. In other words, it’s the most basic requirement for avoiding war in the future.

The war was not about forcing Iraq to destroy its weapons. It was about forcing Iraq to comply with the UN Resolutions – the truce in the Gulf War. What’s the difference? It was estimated at the time that Saddam could reconstitute his WMD programs within four months if he so desired. We had 200,000 troops on his borders – which is the only reason there were any UN inspectors in Iraq. Once we had pulled those forces (and we would have had to do that sooner rather than later) Saddam would be free to do what he wanted. He had already launched two aggressive wars and spent $40 billion on a nuclear weapons program. We were put in the position of trusting his word (that he would comply) or going to war. We took the prudent course. To say that we went to war merely to destroy the stockpiles every intelligence agency in the world said he had is to misunderstand entirely what this war was about.