I have spent my entire day debating. From debating both sides of the global overpopulation problem (is it a problem?) to talking politics with my neighbor and as soon as I finish posting this I am heading to a debate on something entirely different from either of those things. Film at eleven.

My neighbor sent me this note:
*my friend zip,

have you kept-up with the oil-for-food scandal? it's getting more interesting every day. seems like a realistic leap here is that, at the minimum, large sums of money were available through saddam to multiple terrorist organizations, to the tune of scores of billions. hmmmm. seems like the world was getting ripped-off by a sadistic tyrant, the people who suffered the most were the innocent, intended recipients of the money and those who benefited the most were no doubt evil
manipulators.

good golly, shortly before the invasion, the un was talking about expanding the oil-for-... program. no wonder.

i remember hearing harsh criticisms over the years from various sources of the decision not to overthrow saddam at the
conclusion of phase one of the thirteen year-old war, most notably the kurds who felt abandoned by the un/us. and there has
been harsh criticism of the us policy to support saddam during the iran/iraq war and also for our long-term support of
saddam. point is, the antagonists to the liberation of iraq were/are doing the same as the us has been repeatedly criticized for. and i say bravo to bush for having the guts to take a moral stand and say enough is enough. what saddam did to his country's stability and prosperity was immoral.

the estimates are as high as 40 billion dollars skimmed from the program. i'm sure none of it went to terrorist organizations or wmd programs.

sorry, i just think the administration saw this scandal long ago and knew the support from those on the take was a lost cause. it also saw early-on the irrelevance of the un and kofi anan. in short, it was because of the un that saddam was allowed to flourish and nothing short of removing the head of the beast had a chance of succeeding (it's your guess as to

To which I have responded with this:

Dear neighbor, my friend, please don't apologize for the way you feel. On these things we agree: Saddam needed to be gone; Iraq will, ultimately, hopefully, I pray, be better for what we have done there; The oil for food program was a scandal; The UN, in terms of forceful strength, has outlived its usefulness.

However, I draw the line at condoning an invasion of another country based on evidence discovered after the fact. If this administration was so certain of this scandal then, why didn't it come clean then instead of throwing out bogus reasons based on fraudulent evidence? Is it too much to ask that before we send people to die for something, that we do so based on empirical evidence? They relied on a self-serving spy's testimony because it was what they wanted to hear. This administration had plans well before 9/11 to invade Iraq. Even on 9/12, the first thing they set about doing was this invasion.

Forget about the fact that Condi Rice, John Ashcroft, et al completely ignored information handed to them by the Clinton administration telling them exactly what they needed to know to prevent those terror attacks from ever happening. Forget about the fact that Colin Powell and other military leaders fought hard against rushing in, but the neo-conservatives in this administration - namely Rice, Rumsfield, Bush, Cheney and Rove - who've never actually served in the military, so what the hell do they really know about it that Powell doesn't? - pushed for and won the movement. And now suddenly there's a "legitimate" link that you're raising between Iraq and Al Queda that somehow makes it all right? It would only make it all right if 10,000 civilians hadn't already been killed.

And where's your liberal media on that little number? We don't hear about that - nor do we hear about the White House's trump of the bi-partisan bill to further fund veterans' healthcare because why? Because the monies wouldn't have gone directly to the war effort. So, shoot up the soldiers, alright, but who cares how they mend once returned home. You want to know why so many veterans I've met have been angry at Dubya? This is it.

But I don't actually expect so much from an administration that comes from the state w/ the highest teenaged birth rate (not to mention divorce rate) in the country and has just mandated use of abstinence-only text books. And while standing on the stump of the Constitution, cried out for an amendment to make discrimination legal - again - as though we really really don't live in the 21st century, as though our history of slavery and illegal incarceration of minorities in this country (I'm thinking of the Japanese-Americans during WW2) isn't what it most certainly is.

If hindsight were truly 20/20, we wouldn't repeat our most egregious mistakes.

American Muslims today wouldn't be afraid to leave their homes, or their country, for fear of not being allowed back in, or for fear of being rounded up and put in prisons without recourse like 5,000 inmates in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Timothy McVeigh was not a Muslim.

But it's too much to expect reason based on reality from a man completely certain of his being "right" when his own background is littered with failures.

Do you know why the ostrich sticks its head in the sand? To look for water. When a human being sticks his head in the sand, it is to ignore his reality.

I am someone who firmly believes we should have settled this thing the first time, even with my brother on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, firing weapons used for the first time that I helped write the curriculum for.

Let me tell you, it's a perverse sense of patriotism to see something you've designed go into effect to kill other people.

I continue to believe that we should have taken Saddam out then. But the fact is, we did not, and for good reason -- the existence of violent turmoil as we're seeing today as a result of this second war. Read George HW Bush's autobiography to get a glimpse of his rationale on this. It cost him the election - that and a crappy economy - but it made sense.


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so, I ask you, when is enough enough?