[Brandon]

Yes, I would be crying foul because the United States - indeed no country - has the legal right to launch a pre-emptive military attack against any nation. If the United States considers itself part of the international community, then it must abide by the very rules of that community. Heck, Gulf War I was fought ostensibly to oust Iraq from Kuwait because it had launched a pre-emptive strike against a country it perceived to be a threat to its economic well-being. Let's not forget the American outrage over Pearl Harbour. The United States has the right to protect itself and its citizens with all means that conform to all international legal standards, but pre-emptive war is not one of these means.

If international law prohibits peaceful democracies from taking measures against rogue states that threaten them and harbor terrorists, then international law is in grievous error. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and ESPECIALLY Saudi Arabia were/are not peaceful, law-abiding nations by any means. They themselves have broken "international law" by harboring and even FINANCING terrorist activity, acquiring nuclear arsenals, and oppressing their citizenry with draconian Sharia laws. To denounce free, democratic nations for taking military action would be the most profound idiocy.

We need to abandon this ridiculous notion (that the U.N. fosters, I might add) that all nations are created equal. All people are created equal, but to call the goverments of Iran and North Korea morally equal to the United States is a tremendous mistake.

What do you call the provision that the United States must approve any Iraqi constitution before it can be put to a vote before its citizenry? What do you call hand-picking the majority of members of the provisional government who are drafting said constitution and doling out the development contracts for control of everything from garbage collection to water utilities?

It's still not "dictating the terms," it's merely making sure that the government Iraq intends to set up is the government we went to war to see created. We don't want them to slip by a faux Constitution that paves the way for theocracy, do we?

Your argument is irrelavant. The fact of the matter is that the Bush Administration took NO STEPS to increase efforts to stymie al Qaeda. By all accounts, it cut staff to the counter-terrorism department for which Richard Clarke was responsible. It ignored a PDB by its hand-picked intelligence advisors that warned an attack against an American interest by al Qaeda was in the near future, viewing the report, as Dr. Rice described, as a historical analysis. It was feting Taliban officials, the very patrons of al Qaeda, in the summer of 2001.

I'm not making excuses for their inactivity; not by a long shot. My point was merely that Democrats are so intent on being anti-Bush that they've unwittingly created an argument that hard-line policies (which they've been decrying post-9/11) should have been implemented. They've gone into bed with the hawks over nothing more than pure partisanship.