I don't know if President Bush will lay out his case at the upcoming UN speech on Sept 12, but I doubt it. I believe he will first address the nation from the Oval Office, I believe he will do it at a time that won't endanger American lives. I believe President Bush will give clear and convincing evidence that this action is required, and I believe it will shut up his critics.
I'm skeptical too...we're lied to all the time...but I'm not skeptical of President Bush. We elected an honest man to the office, remember?
You're a smart person.
Carolyn
The lesson of 9/11 is that any regime that supports these terrorists, or itself is a terrorist regime, has a tangible means and opportunity to attack us.
So I have to ask: if Saddam's agents released a bio device in downtown LA, or nuked Tel Aviv, what would that do to your conscience? I, for one, could not live with myself if I had the ability to stop such a thing ahead of time, which we do.
I guess I'll never trust our power elite.
If you read The New Dealers' War by Thomas Fleming, I guarantee you'll see it that way.Fleming is a Truman Democrat, as he told Brian Lamb on C-Span. But his book makes the case that a huge leak nominally against FDR just before Pearl Harbor was actually an FDR plant to embarass the Isolationists. He says that before Pearl Harbor Americans were 80% united in opposition to fighting Germany (and if you reflect on the fact that Nevile Chamberlain's appeasement was popular in Britain until Hitler and Stalin started WWII, that has to be a believable statistic).
So as is widely known now (e.g., the movie Tora, Tora, Tora!)--but was Top Secret throughout WWII--Roosevelt was briefed by Naval Intelligence that Japan would break diplomatic relations with Washington on Dec 7 about a week beforehand.
A huge broughaha was raised on Dec 4 when a hostile Chicago paper printed the Roosevelt War Department's plan to raise a huge army and fight Germany and Japan. So the isolationists were raising all-out heck on December 7, 1941. Right when the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor! So we know, as the public during WWII did not, that FDR had the motive and opportunity to make that leak, at just the right time. The author credits that leak with motivating Hitler to declare war on the United States (note that he waited a week to do it; he wasn't treaty obligated to do so, and he had not wanted to do so).
The joker being, that FDR seems to have acquired the overpowering urge to get into war with Germany on or about June 22, 1941 (when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union). He tried to get the public agitated over German U-boats in the Atlantic, but since that didn't take so he pushed Japan into a corner, and things worked just the way he hoped. Japan attacked, and Germany declared war. Perfect!! Not too good if you were on a battleship in Pearl Harbor (and if the Navy hadn't been overruled by Roosevelt they wouldn't have been there), and not if you were one of the 20,000 Americans in the Philipines--but good enough to get Lend-Lease supplies headed to the USSR.
Actually, it wasn't especially good for the owners and crew of the 397 (!) merchantmen that were sunk of the east coast of the US by June 1942, either . . . but then, that number was secret--just like the U-boat loss total of zero during that time.