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The insane leftists have an infinite supply of conspiracy tales to spin. The response is simple--the President's statement at the initiation of action, and Rumsfeld's initial statement on the war provide both the motivations and aims for the conflict. These statements hold-up today. BTW, note that opposing Saddam's links to terror is one of the factors involved. His funding of Palestinian suicide/homicide bombers certainly falls under that rubric. This is a big so-what.

But the media does. Once this story breaks, we need a response.
How about this one: Shut up, stupid.

Or this one: But I thought it was about oil or Bush's daddy or neo-con imperial-aspirations?

Or how about this one: What color is the sky in your world?

Or this one: Why is it always the Jooz, lame-brain? Can't you eternally-flaccid paranoiacs fixate on some other ethnic group and give the Jooz a break for once?

I agree. After all, why would any rational personal consider someone like Hussein to be a threat given that he was having his people regularly fire missiles at our pilots. Or given that he was regularly issuing threats similar to the ones issued by bin Laden about attacking the United States. Indeed, we know from repeated dealings with nasty types like Hussein that they never follow through on their threats, particularly when you fail to respond to their repeated attempts to kill your fellow countrymen. In fact, people like Hussein respect that type of restrain in their adversaries and recognize that it shows real strength of character just like was shown by the western democracies in the leadup to 1939.

This issue is certainly worthy of discussion, and this is precisely why people like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith should never have been allowed to work for the Bush administration in the first place.

The objectivity of these two men was compromised from the first day they set foot in the Bush administration, in light of their call for a regime change in Iraq in 1996. Calling for a regime change itself wasn't the problem. The real concern was that they did so in a paper they presented to the Netanyahu government in Israel, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Security the Realm." In case anyone still doesn't know this by now, the "realm" they were talking about was Israel, not the United States.

Perle's nebulous role as an "unpaid advisor" to the Bush administration on the Defense Policy Board has raised serious warning flags in my mind from the beginning, and I don't consider myself to be a raving lunatic of any kind, either. These concerns have been reinforced by the manner in which Perle quietly disappeared from the scene last year, once it became apparent that the President's silly show on the deck of the aircraft carrier last May wasn't the defining moment it was intended to be.

I certainly wasn't surprised to learn that Mr. Perle was working as a lobbyist for Global Crossing, lobbying on their behalf to get the U.S. government to approve the sale of some of the company's fiber-optic assets to a telecommunications giant in Red China.

Why the Bush administration insisted on having this bastard play any role whatsoever in this country's foreign policy decisions over the last few years is something I'll never understand.

One response is that the left can't have it two ways which are diametrically opposed. Their main attack on the president has been that he knew Iraq had no WMD and that, in fact, Iraq's WMD program was in shambles, and the administration knew that Hussein was bluffing.

How does that square with Zelikow's claim that the administration believed Iraq's WMD were a formidable threat to Israel's security?