[PornoDoggy]

I'm just not sure what I think is dumber ... the idea that it's all about oil for our gas-guzzling S.U.V.s, or the "we were attacked on 9/11, and he's a terrorist, and he's a Muslim, so we gotta attack him" mentality.

But Alex, if the U.S. was going to go to war over oil riddle me this ... why the fuck did we ever leave Kuwait? Get real - if oil was all we wanted we'd end the sanctions and flood the country with Haliburton executives and Starbucks franchises - and he'd accept them. Saddam Hussein is as much of a fundamentalist Islamist as John Ashcroft is a convert to Hasidism. And if the U.S. were inclined to go to war for oil, I think we could find significant quantities of it much closer to home. Better beer, too ....

Carrie, only the predisposed or truly naive would believe that Saddam Hussien's claims of Islamic purity as uttered to Dan Rather were anything other than posturing. A number of the folks his terrorist regime has killed off include Islamic fundamentalists. As far as him killing his own people, well, jeez, we've had a lot of friends throughout the years who've done that - is that what compassionate conservatism is? He was killing his own people just as proficiently back when he was our ally against Iran. Are we going to renoucnce that kind of short sighted policy? Only one American President - Jimmy Carter - has ever tried to distance us from that kind of policy. Can I assume that Bush & Co. have decided Carter was right?

And you're angry because Saddam said he's going to strike back why? What the hell was he supposed to say - "Oh, golly gee Dan, if you blokes come over here to my country and start a war, well, I wish you wouldn't, but I assure you I'm going to be sporting about it and play by the rules?" In case you haven't noticed those are U.S. troops piling up on his borders. He's going to play every game in the book to attempt to persuade American public opinion that this war is a mistake. If he thinks that threatening America is a way to do that he's far stupider than I thought - but that's not the audience he was playing to. Saddam knows exactly what the people in Homeland Security knows - the alQaida types (remember alQaida?) will use our war with their pther enemy - Iraq - as recruiting fodder, and probably strike at us here and around the globe. They were going to do that anyway, but using the war in Iraq as an excuse is very effective propaganda for them.