No, slide: the reason Iraq was invaded is because your government (and the British, yes) lied and stated that Saddam Hussein had or was attempting to acquire or build nuclear (Niger yellowcake), chemical (sold to him by US companies, with approval from State Department in the 80s, and any stocks left (unlikely) were almost certainly denatured by 2000), and biological (US pharmaceuticals sold him anthrax and botulism) weapons. All this forgot or ignored the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors had been poking their noses into every awkward corner they could find, making it quite difficult to make new produiction facilities, and had completely decommissioned the aforementioned pre-Gulf War WMD capability.

There was no “perceived ability,” your government just lied through its teeth!

I am guessing you meant this as a dig to the Bush administration, but it does actually support such things as the Patriot Act in preventing the subject of Rudy’s ad from killing a few thousand more people.

It also points out what Bush/Cheney et.al are not. Installing a Dictator would be easier, and more effective at quelling dissent of the Iraqi population. It would also make possible the conspiracies the Left has dreamed up about Halliburton and Cheney’s net worth, and the Leftist harangue about American Imperialism.

But that is not what is being done. Instead they are actually trying to bring about a free Iraq, with all the risks of what people might actually do with their freedom.

The major reason for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam’s willingness and perceived ability to use WMD in terror attacks posed an immediate threat to the rest of us. Because it was a perceived threat, support for the war was not as strong as in the first Gulf War.

This ‘ability’ to use, and therefore the immediacy of the threat, has been shown to be wrong. Support for the war as fallen faster then it otherwise would have because of this.

This is the problem with preemptive strikes.

Slide, I left some NATO countries off – I put up the ones I had something to write about. Though after checking the NATO membership, I find I did actually leave them all off… hmm. I suppose I must have thought they were semi-credible allies at the time of posting.

You make a statement that NATO countires were not part of the war effort

No, I didn’t. I said “Germany and, France, which are NATO countries“. I was trying to establish why their absence would be considered strange.
Please try to attack what I write, not what you thought I wrote.

I can’t spend the time to thoroughly refute you anymore, slide. It’s a pity, I was enjoying myself. If you promise to play nice and restrict the arguments to things I can respond to in 20 lines or less, I might be able to continue. Ad hominen attacks should do fine, if you can’t come up with anything else.

I think we probably are done here. If the Coalitions attempts to create a democracy in Iraq fails, then the world is worse off. If the democracy succeeds, the world is better for it. Should it have been attempted in the first place? Well lets not start that again.

The point I ws trying to make is that many of the smaller NATO countries went because it was the US asking, and the US had produced intelligence saying Iraq had WMD, and (I’m assuming; intelligence services tend not to advertise their existence, operations, or anything else) these smaller countries wouldn’t have the intelligence assets to independently check the intelligence. Germany, on the other hand, had BND agents in Baghdad before and during the invasion (as evidenced by the fact that a German agent in Qatar was assigned to pass information to the invasion force, which included troop disposition – and in some cases positions – in what was apparently a quid pro quo arrangement with US intelligence), so perhaps they knew that the dossier that was the stated reason for the war was, to quote Ford, bunk.
The French had the best intelligence on the ground according to a British agent (in fact, they extracted the German agents); remember how vociferous France was in attempting to prevent the war?

Okay, if my point about local guerilla resistance being enormously difficult to defeat doesn’t stand up, knock it down. Explicitly, please, as I can think of three examples (that lasted 30 years, at least) without trying.

The Bush Administrations has made Iraq a battelfield for the war on terror.

Oh boy, haven’t they.

I linked to the full list at the time of the invasion, said I was using that list, and said I hadn’t included all the members. In fact, here’s precisely what I said:

Here’s the Coalition in 2003, according to the White House. I’ll use extracts here, as the whole list is unwieldy.

Now, if you think I should have cut and pasted the whole list for no good reason, I’m sorry. I find encountering a post in a blog’s comments that is as long as the blog itself a very bad sign, and try not to write such.

And if you have to use statements like “any human endeavour is flawed from the start” to excuse the idiocy, graft, and mayhem that has been the Iraq “war”…

Anyway: I’ve let you set the pace, and drag us backwards and forwards across the actual argument, and I have yet to see you make one substantive point.
Here are mine, the main thrust of what I’ve been trying to say.

The Iraq invasion has made the USA – and the world – a less secure, more dangerous place. Fact.

The War On Terror is a war on an amorphous, chameleonic Hydra that will never be defeated by sending in the Marines. You fight terrorism like you fight a forest fire; you deprive it of fuel, and try to put out sparks. Deprive Islamic terrorism of fuel? Remove the reasons young Islamic men feel they have nothing to live for, are full of hate, and are vulnerable to being indoctinated that dying will bring them to Paradise? It’d probably involve such things as education and jobs. Other than that, it’s beyond me; but that’s okay, I’m just an idiot at a computer.
Put out sparks? Abu Ghraib was a spark. Blackwater and its ilk are sparks. Guantanamo is a spark. The rape and murder of that 14-year-old Iraqi girl is a spark. The internment of large numbers of Iraqis for no stated reason is a spark.
You get the picture?

The point remains, holding up the likes of the governments of France and Germany at the time, while ignoring the other NATO contries that did go to Iraq, is disshonest. And yes you were being dishonest in your ommission. It is also disshonest for Demoracts to try to retrace there steps and claim Bush tricked them into voting for the war.

Any human indevor is flawed from the start. WWII is no exception and your point of saying ‘local boys’ cannot be defeated does not stand up. There is no obuscation in my argument. Your cutting and pasting has no point, that is obfuscation.

The Bush Administrations has made Iraq a battelfield for the war on terror. Now that it is, it should be supported as one. Rudy’s ad reminds us why