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I don't care if Saddam lives or dies. He is nothing to me. If he *does* attack us in some direct manner, we declare war on Iraq and level Bagdad, with a nuke if necessary. We can do this, and Saddam knows it. Therefore, if he wants to live (and he does), he will leave the US alone. He may think ill thoughts about us, and he may say bad things about us in public, but he will not move against us directly unless we attack him first.

Thank you for your response. Now... when you say that Iraq hasn't and won't attack us "directly" you are right. We in the west think of an "attack" in the Western sense of conventional warfare, also a legacy of the British. Conventional warfare is where the two sides line up nice and neat and march toward each other. Conventional invasion is where their ships pull up to our beaches and discharge soldiers who come running up onto the sand. Conventional attack is where planes fly overhead dropping bombs. This is the western way. This is what we recognize as "first strike." Saddam has no capability to do this, we are too far away and he does not have the technology to strke at the mainland.

But Saddam is not "western." Like Marxist rebels the world over, he knows that the best way to attack a superpower is with guerilla warfare. The attack on the WTC back in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing are guerilla warfare with links to Iraq. The attacks of 9/11 are guerilla warfare with links to Iraq. You feel the links are not strong enough. I feel they are. One of the aspects of guerilla warfare, of course, is to displace blame so that the attacked do not know or are not completely sure at whom to strike back.

As for your optimistic survey of our moral comfort concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki, don't speak too fast. My university is giving a series called "9/11, one year later" and 2 of the 3 speakers have referred to those incidents as evidence of US "terrorism." Convincing the civilian populace of the necessity of dismantling one of the regimes funding this guerilla warfare is impossible. Anti-Americanism is too strong and it isn't because of our foreign policy. It's because we are capitalist (mostly, still) and our enemies are universally collectivist. And if you think that Muslims and Marxists, or Islamists and secular dictators, won't form temporary alliances to fight a common enemy, I think you are mistaken.

I use the word 'directly' fairly often because without it, some people will happily play 'six degrees of seperation' whereby they can connect Saddam Hussian to the death of Princess Di and so forth. Most of the speeches I've heard from the Bush Administration have been in the form of 'we have evidence that links Iraq with ...' or 'we have confirmed reports that ...' or (my personal favorite) 'Captured Taliban/Al-Queda members have stated ...' The linking thread to all of these is a lack of physical evidence and a reliance on the reputation of those making the statements.

Don't you think a war should require a little more than a 'we have reason to believe'? I do.

I also use the word 'directly' to mean an attack in a manner which can be traced, point to point, back to the Iraqi government, if not to Saddam himself. Bank statements, a spy-taped interview between a terrorist and a member of the Iraqi government, recon photos showing terrorist training camps with Iraqi military giving training. A link. A smoking gun. With all of our high tech gizmos, I am astonished that nothing has been forthcoming -- at least, nothing I've seen.

As for your optimistic survey of our moral comfort concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki, don't speak too fast.

I wasn't speaking of them at all, not as seperate events. I was talking about the war as a whole. From 12/7/41 right up to the nuking of Nagasaki, the US was about as unified as it can get: politically, morally, socially. We were a house united, not a house divided, as we increasingly are today.