[RobbyS]

It is you who are morally blind. War produces evils that are impossible to calculate in advance. The Civil War freed the slaves' it also unleased cupidity on a vast scale and physically wrecked the lives of millions. I can support the war on the ground of necessity, but that entails a leap of faith. I think George Bush is rightly making a gamble, because the region is so unstable that if Saddam stays he has the potential to cause ruin everywhere. One can reasonably oppose the war, however. The pope is right to believe that the Muslims may be driven mad by defeat here. Or the shock of light may clear their minds, as it did those of the Germans in 1945. What will be, will be.

[ultima ratio]

You argue against something I never said. Wars always include unanticipated consequences which are in themselves evil. Life is not neat in that way, nor do I imagine it to be. Saddam is now arming ten year olds. Do we shoot them before they shoot us? Harry Truman dropped the bomb--in order to avoid millions of more casualties in a war that had already claimed 53 million people. That is the nature of war and it is dirty and ugly. But some evil can grow and metastasize if not confronted. That is where we are now with Saddam and it is MORE evil to appease such a man than to finally say, NO MORE, you will kill no more innocents. Had we stopped Hitler early-on--do you imagine he would have gone on to conquer all of Europe? But instead he was appeased--and his appetite for blood and horror thereafter knew no bounds.