The Mainstream Media likes to change the reasons we went to war in order to call Bush a liar. They conveniently forget or ignore what really happened.
The United Nations, in Resolution 1441, gave Saddam one last chance to disarm and to prove that he had disarmed. There were a myriad number of banned weapons and programs that he had admitted to earlier. He needed to show that he had, in fact, abandoned them. Proof would be showing where they were buried, or, at the very least, a bookkeeping analysis of their disposition.
Saddam did not comply with the resolution at all (even the French and the Germans concede that point.) So, we were left with having given Saddam an ultimatum and having him ignore it. The question becomes: what do you do when a "final" ultimatum is ignored. If you are the United Nations, you do nothing. If you are George Bush, you do something.
What we have is, on a grander scale, the equivalent of police officers chasing down a suspect in a shooting. Many witnesses saw the perpetrator's weapon. The cops scream, "Stop or I'll shoot!" He doesn't stop. They shoot. No weapons are found. Therefore (if you are a liberal) they never existed.
Bottom line--we went into Iraq because Saddam did not adhere to inernational demands, all of which stemmed from the peace agreement following his invasion of Kuwait (the Gulf War.) It would have been great to have found weapons, but the finding of them is not a necessary condition to the underlying reason for the invasion--Saddam had been given a final opportunity to comply, and he failed to do so.
Great post!