I wanted to chime in for a moment to comment about the following statement:
> Regarding his weapons programs ... Until the eve of war, even Saddam's top generals thought he had WMDs, so is it any surprise that the rest of the world did as well?
This is blatantly untrue and unfounded.
1) As a logical point, no one can discern what someone else thinks or thought. All one can reliably draw upon is what someone is quoted to have stated, written, or done.
2) After capture, Saddam stated that his comments supporting WMDs were lies done to keep Iran and others at bay. His top generals would have knowledge of any facilities needed to build or house WMDs and/or their delivery means.
3) The US government *never* had any proof of an Iraq WMD program.
I urge all to draw your own conclusion from verified facts rather than conjecture.
Other than that, I used to frequent another site which had political argument after political argument. The end result of this process was a polarized group of people who ended up hating each other due to things which they could neither control nor alter the course. The goal of that site became a daily exercise in argument after increasingly bitter argument. This thread is following that path.
It is a healthy thing to comment and debate the deeds, misdeeds, and atrocities of any government, but use caution as the relative anonymity of the web often turns otherwise friendly and truth seeking discourse into hateful invective. The latter is most definitely not what this site is about.