I'm totally torn up over Iraq. I see Saddam as a seriously bad guy who should have been removed a long time ago - 12 years ago actually - for the sake of the Iraqi people. The problem now is that there's no immediate justification for taking him out. Yes, Powell was completely convincing in the sense that we see now that Saddam is hiding something; the problem is that what he's hiding - chemical weapons - isn't that big a deal. And the regional risks of invading are enormous: we're creating potential terrorists throughout the Muslim world, pushing a well-armed dictator to the wall, and (most importantly) setting a precedent for preemptive action whose consequences we haven't really considered (just look at today's paper, with the NK's threatening to whip up some preemption of their own). On top of that I have deep suspicions that the war will not be as easy as the public expects... after all, there's a reason we didn't invade Baghdad in '91.

It's not all that different if we do it under the aegis of the UN, but at least with international backing the US could share the negative consequences with the rest of the civilized world... and btw they could also share the costs of rebuilding Iraq, which along with the war costs haven't been figured into Bush's ailing budget. This whole flap at the UN was a gamble that didn't pan out, but now the Bush admin won't play fair... they blame other nations for blocking military action that was a foregone conclusion with processes that Bush himself called for. This line in the state of the union that everyone was so impressed with about wanting results, not processes - doesn't it strike a serious blow against any realistic notion of intl order?

The problem now though is so much bigger than squabbling about who will support a war, or how soon we can lay down the first punches. The problem is that everything we do now is a message to the Koreans - when we say, for instance, that we will respond to chemical attacks with nuclear force, what will it say to Kim Jong Il if we don't follow through? When we line up NK and Iraq as equal partners in the axis of evil and then we attack Iraq, what does that say? Or when Bush says that he loathes Kim Jong Il... how do you respond to that? By honoring a treaty?

So... in a perfect world I don't feel like we should be invading Iraq, but I also think we've locked ourselves into a course of action where it's not possible to simply change our mind and back out... if we back away, we end up with a cold war in the Pacific (in fact, we're probably already at this stage). If we invade and things don't go well, same problem.