If I have good reason to expect you to hit me, I will hit you first or run away and hide.
A country like the US can't hide and can't run away. Our borders are open and our country is free. That makes us vulnerable, but vulnerable is better than what the Soviet Union imposed on eastern Europe.
So am I, and it was attacked on 11 September 2001 by terrorists supported by nations such as Iraq.
All such nations -- and those people dancing in the streets over the 9/11 attack -- are America's enemies in this current war.
You should be thanking God that President Bush is smart enough -- and brave enough -- to identify and attack them.
Abe, while enough information may never be made public to confirm this, I believe the reason the President decided it was imperative to remove Hussein was the anthrax attacks. Any well-informed, fair-minded person has to acknowledge that prior to mid-2003, virtually the entire world believed Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
It is a fact that he used them both on Iranians and on Kurdish Iraqis. It is a fact that UN inspectors found and documented stockpiles before they were thrown out of the country in 1998. It is a fact that he supported terrorists; even paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 each. It is a fact that he had proven himself time and time again to be a dangerous, destablizing influence in the Middle East.
Even moreso than the 9/11 hijackings, the anthrax attacks raised the notion that a rogue state might pass such materials on to terrorists from merely the stuff of novels and musty studies to a very real, immediate possibility. The anthrax attacks are still very much a mystery today, over two years later. Did the anthrax come from Iraq? Perhaps we'll never know. Could it have come from Iraq? Yes.
In any case, faced with the actuality of those attacks, no president, no matter his ideology or party, could fail to take measures to at least try to prevent it from happening again. President Bush has said it over and over and over again. He did so again last night. In his judgment, we could not and cannot afford to wait until monsters like Hussein, Kim Il Jong, Osama bin Laden, and others pair up suicidal fanatics with something that can kill millions.
President Bush has also said many times that he believes the first duty of any president is to protect the American people. One of the tactics he decided to employ was to take out Hussein. Remove him as a potential threat and make an example of him at the same time.
Now, fair-minded people who understand and acknowledge all of the above might still disagree with the President's judgment to take out Hussein. Fine. But to demean him (and all Christians) as "clueless," and to pretend that there was no valid reason at all for taking out Hussein, not only marks you as a bigot, but may very well mark you as a pretty dim bulb as well.
Jesus also said to render unto Caesar. . .Christians are expected to pay taxes without having to be threatened with imprisonment, et al.
"I'm all for defending our country when it has been attacked."
Great, so pre-emption isn't your bad. I would remind you, however, that the God of the bible sent Israel into war a number of times pre-emptively.
So which are you - a clueless Christian or a clueless non-Christian? It must be one or the other since you've obviously missed some things in your study of scripture.