Quote Originally Posted by alan View Post

....and considering the terrorist threat at the time, Saddam's refusal to comply with UN sanctions, his firing upon aircraft attempting to enforce the no-fly zone, and the very real possibility that he may partner with Al-Qaeda in their joint efforts against the west, the Bush administration simply made a false claim in order to justify an invasion? That there was no compelling reason to take force to ensure that terrorists did not get their hands on whatever weapons he may have at his disposal and to ensure that he would not initiate further force against the western forces tasked with enforcing the UN's sanctions?

We know that he was warned as far back as the above Clinton speech what the consequences of those actions would be, and yet it's still a simple matter of "Bush lied, people died"?

If you were in charge and believed the truism of "the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction", what would you have done?
I firmly believe that there were other options at that time then a full scale war/invasion to bring Iraq into complience with the UN inspections order. I don't believe there was an imminent threat to the USA nor it's allies. And given the info that had been gathered at the various inspections since the late 1990's, I don't think there was compelling evidence of WMD. So what would I do? Well probably the same thing we did in the CG when we got intelligence from a known a reliable source that a foriegn ship (lets say Russian) was smuggling some sort of contraband (lets say weapons). We didn't just hunt them down and lob rockets at them from a mile away until they sank based on that intelligence alone. We attempted to board them and inspected them. If they didn't comply, ran away or fired upon us we used reasonable force for the situation to make them comply so that we could inspect them. If that didn't work, then yes, we'd probably sink the ship. Much like Clinton did in his air bombings you mentioned - "Dudes, if you don't let us inspect your baby milk factory we're gonna assume you're hiding something and will blow it to Kingdom come". What we didn't do was attack and take over the entire Russian shipping fleet based on the "possibility" that a few ships WERE smuggling weapons. I have no problem with the enforcement of UN sanctions by the military force, but I don't believe that the situation warranted a full scale military assault of an entire country based on the limited intel they had, as well as the fact that not one inspector that DID get to inspect the sites ever found anything of note. Just my .2 cents - probably worth less :-)!