The anti-war people are just anti-action.I have no respect for the position of the "anti-war" people.  They just want to make it tougher for the people who are stuck having to make real decisions.

The Bush-bashing is usually the most amusing though becaue it demonstrates the lack of rational thought by some people. Bill "multilaterialsm" Clinton suffered more terror attacks on the United States than Bush has.  After 9/11 there have been zero attacks on the United States. By contrast, under Clinton we had the USS Cole, the embassy bombings and the first WTC attack. In those cases, Clinton tried to work with "the international community" and treat the whole thing almost purely as a law enforcement excercise.

And what did such restraint do for us? 9/11 was planned during Clinton's watch. In other words, we tried the "multilateral" approach (multilateral in this case meaning having France and Germany's support since the US has had the support of dozens of nations in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush). We tried the diplomatic approach and the result was 9/11.  And since we changed our strategy under Bush our successes have been quite strong.

After all, it wasn't the US Al Qaeda bombed on 3/11, it was Spain because they predicted, correctly, that the Spanish people would cave in and elect someone who was more willing to move back towards inaction. Al Qaeda has suffered grievous losses since 9/11 and is trying to get the pressure taken off of them.

Some people seem to make an artificial distinction between domestic murders and international murderers. If someone native to your country goes on a senseless killing spree, the reaction is to go after them aggressively and put them behind bars. Yet, if that same homicidal lunatic is foreign, you'll instantly have the protester class argue that we need to negotize with them. Understand where they're coming from. Consider what we may have done to upset them. Work with lots of other countries, particularly ones that have no real common interest with us in solving the problem to deal with these lunatics.

Look people, we're dealing with killers here. People who do things specifically to murder as many innocent people as possible. The US strategy, like it or not, has worked pretty well. Go after them directly. Eliminate their allies or potential allies. Dry up their funding. It's no coincidence that Al Qaeda went after Spain first and not say the USA or UK. Maybe thanks to the appeasement from Spain that Al Qaeda will believe (incorrectly) that the voters in the US and UK can be cowed into submission by a terrorst attack before their next election.

And yet when faced with a difficult decision we always hear about "other options" from those who are against the proposed actions by leaders. But those other options are rarely specified. For intance the inspectors had been kicked out in 1998 and no one seemed to care about inspections until the US made them an issue again.

Leadership requires coming up with a plan and carrying it out. Curling up into the fetal position under your desk may seem like a "position" but it's not. It's simply the absence of a position. Being against something without being for something instead is not a position. It's the absence of a position.

I'm all for other options. If those other options are actions are convincingly likely to have the desired affect. NOT doing something is not an option. It's simply a lack of action. If someone is murdering my neighbors, I'm not likely to consider "doing nothing" an option. I want the murders stopped. Somehow. Most people are open to hearing various ideas on how the murderer can be stopped. The anti-action people need to step up and provide realistic alternatives.

War, after all, wasn't our first option. Treating the war on terrorism as a law enforcement issue was the strategy pursued from 1992 to 2001. It results in 9/11. Treating this as a military matter from 2001 to 2004 has thus far eliminated direct attacks on the United States and forced the terrorists into going after seemingly arbitrary targets to kill civilians (I mean, heck, if you have a half dozen guys with access to explosives you could kill lots of people too, not exactly the same impact as crashing hijacks airliners into the largest buildings in the world).

After 9/11, most Americans had enough common sense to recognize that we couldn't go on indefinitely letting Saddam violate his agreements and be an open enemy of the United States. We didn't have that luxury. We knew this because 9/11 showed us that the Islamofascists would use any weapon they could get ahold of, including civilian airliners, to murder Americans. And since Saddam was an open enemy of the United States, we knew that he had every incentive to provide weapons to Al Qaeda. Maybe not imminently but at some point. So after Afghanistan it made sense to deal with Saddam before Al Qaeda could effectively regroup. And so we did.

The arguments, if they can be called that, to remove Saddam were always incredibly weak in my opinion. And the results already justified the action. Saddam is captured. By Boulbushead's argument the legitimate government of Iraq is controlled by the United States. And it was all done with only a few hundred casualties total. Simply amazing. But the anti-war people are so lame that they fixate that we didn't find stockpiles of chemical weapons. Big deal. I for one never considered stockpiles of chemcial weapons to be a significant threat. It was the future threat that Iraq posed -- i.e. a POST-sanctions Iraq posed that I was worried about. Better to deal with Saddam now while we had a reasonably good excuse to do so than later when it would be politically more difficult.

I'm particularly disappointed with the Spanish because they have, effectively, forced the heavy lifting of this war to be more on the shoulders of the British, Americans, Australians, and Poles. As if we somehow want to have to send our soldiers into battle. I think if you asked any American, Brit, Aussie, or Pole they'd tell you that they'd prefer it if we could just go home and live peacefully together. After all, it's the terrorists murdering our civilians in cold blood and making demands that we must convert to their religion or die. 

To the terrorists, this has been a war for a long time. Only in 2001 did we start to treat it as a war. Whether we treat it as a war or not, the terrorists will be murdering civilians as long as they have the power to do so. The problem isn't going to go away simply by wishing it. Remember, these guys were attacking us when Bill Clinton was President. You're not going to get a more diplomatic President (beloved by Europe's elites) than Clinton. So those who hate Bush need to get a grip and realize the problem isn't Bush. The problem is that there are murderous Islamic zealots who will stop at nothing to murder as many non-Muslims (or even Muslims if they get in the way) as they possibly can as part of their worldwide campaign to bring the world to Allah.