[Dr. Frank fan]

No, I'm looking for the U.S. do do something effective that addresses a real problem. There's no excuse for the fact that throoughout the last ten years the U.S. was far more effective in maintaining a no-fly zone over Iraq than at protecting the citizens of this country from foreign assailants.

Agreed! I would rather have had us take out Saddam in '91 when we had the chance, than to go through the subsequent 12 years of slow warfare that we did. I did not like the "sanctions regime / no fly zone / starve him out of power" approach. It didn't work with Castro and it didn't work with Saddam.

That's why I applauded when we changed our approach and escalated the war to a shooting war, and ousted Saddam militarily once and for all. If you, like me, disliked the former approach ("sanctions/no fly zone"), then why do you not welcome the latter (preemptive military strike)?

[Alberta's Child]

That's why I applauded when we changed our approach and escalated the war to a shooting war, and ousted Saddam militarily once and for all. If you, like me, disliked the former approach ("sanctions/no fly zone"), then why do you not welcome the latter (preemptive military strike)?

Because I was never sold on the need for the first Gulf War to begin with. And the events that followed that first Gilf War (the no-fly zones, the abandonment of the Kurds and Shi'ites who rose up against Hussein, etc.) convinced me that the United States didn't have a freakin' clue what we were doing from one week to the next. And we still don't.