Back to front...
"And this is without even getting past the ridiculous "WMD was the only valid argument for war" nonsense."
How this is nonsense, I don't quite understand. This is the relevant quotation from the UN charter:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
That is to say, you have a right to self-defense which becomes active only if attacked. The "WMD exception" is that, since an active and hostile WMD armed force can inflict either total or crippling damage within one attack, if there is clear evidence of a) such weapons and b ) the likelihood of their use, a nation *might* (this is NOT clear, but at least makes some measure of sense) be entitled to pre-emptively strike in self-defense. Aside from this *single* exception for self-defense, all use of military force in international affairs is the sole jurisdiction of the UN Security Council as outlined elsewhere in the charter. If you attack someone, and it is neither in self-defense or at the behest of the Security Council, you are in violation of international law.
You are not allowed to invade someone to liberate them from themselves, or take control of "necessary" oil reserves, or kill a "bad man", or bring democracy to the middle east, or enact retribution for decades-old crimes, or any one of the other PoS arguments put forth unless you have the blessing of the Security Council. The US deliberately backed off from calling the vote which would have made this war legal, had it passed. If you don't like the law, you can try to get it changed, but you can't just break it whenever you like.
So, returning to the rest of your argument, yes, I do think Bush was quite clearly out of line, not only in terms of the legality of war, but also in terms of his position, even if he had accepted the legal means of pursuing his objectives. It is clear from as much evidence as has come forth that Saddam had nothing even resembling an active weapons program. He did not even have the useful precursors to a weapons program ready to be used. He certainly didn't have any WMD, and, even within that category, any he even theoretically had would have been chemical or low-end biological weapons, capable of killing thousands at best, but not the millions of a nuclear or high-end biological weapon. Inspections and sanctions had kept him feeble and contained, and things were not getting any more dangerous. Pressure plus inspections could have (and, apparently, already had) acheived any useful objective without the need to go to war.
As for the "he used them against his own people", tough. Plenty of nations do as bad or worse, in their own countries or elsewhere. Are we to invade them all? (Hans Blix actually agrees with that position, but points out that there are legal means for doing so.) What if sanctions or military action recommended against them at the time were kept down by a superpower patron, armed with unlimited influence and a Security Council veto? Would the USSR have been justified in invading Iraq in the '80s, when Saddam was gassing his "own people" (the same Kurds who have never really wanted to be part of Iraq, and therefore are an interesting group to lump into his "own people")? I seem to recall that every time the USSR attacked anyone (like Afghanistan), they cited humanitarian reasons, and the US replied that these were complete crap. I don't blame them, since it was complete crap. But so is this. If we want to be global cowboys, and ride our white horses with our white hats and six shooters across international borders, we need to do it under a UN aegis.
Containment helps prevent war. It isn't the prettiest strategy in the world, but we don't live in a pretty world. War, on the other hand, has a long record of f*&king everything up, and should be a *last resort*, not the first thing on one's mind.
I would read Dr. Blix's "Disarming Iraq" for a thorough, unbiased account of what Iraq was and was not doing (and withholding), and some pretty reasonable theories as to why. If you can, at the end of it, really say that this was sufficient justification for going to war, I suppose we'll just have to disagree, but it certainly paints a much less dire picture of the threat Iraq posed than the warmongers did.
Jester
"And this is without even getting past the ridiculous "WMD was the only valid argument for war" nonsense."
How this is nonsense, I don't quite understand. This is the relevant quotation from the UN charter:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."
That is to say, you have a right to self-defense which becomes active only if attacked. The "WMD exception" is that, since an active and hostile WMD armed force can inflict either total or crippling damage within one attack, if there is clear evidence of a) such weapons and b ) the likelihood of their use, a nation *might* (this is NOT clear, but at least makes some measure of sense) be entitled to pre-emptively strike in self-defense. Aside from this *single* exception for self-defense, all use of military force in international affairs is the sole jurisdiction of the UN Security Council as outlined elsewhere in the charter. If you attack someone, and it is neither in self-defense or at the behest of the Security Council, you are in violation of international law.
You are not allowed to invade someone to liberate them from themselves, or take control of "necessary" oil reserves, or kill a "bad man", or bring democracy to the middle east, or enact retribution for decades-old crimes, or any one of the other PoS arguments put forth unless you have the blessing of the Security Council. The US deliberately backed off from calling the vote which would have made this war legal, had it passed. If you don't like the law, you can try to get it changed, but you can't just break it whenever you like.
So, returning to the rest of your argument, yes, I do think Bush was quite clearly out of line, not only in terms of the legality of war, but also in terms of his position, even if he had accepted the legal means of pursuing his objectives. It is clear from as much evidence as has come forth that Saddam had nothing even resembling an active weapons program. He did not even have the useful precursors to a weapons program ready to be used. He certainly didn't have any WMD, and, even within that category, any he even theoretically had would have been chemical or low-end biological weapons, capable of killing thousands at best, but not the millions of a nuclear or high-end biological weapon. Inspections and sanctions had kept him feeble and contained, and things were not getting any more dangerous. Pressure plus inspections could have (and, apparently, already had) acheived any useful objective without the need to go to war.
As for the "he used them against his own people", tough. Plenty of nations do as bad or worse, in their own countries or elsewhere. Are we to invade them all? (Hans Blix actually agrees with that position, but points out that there are legal means for doing so.) What if sanctions or military action recommended against them at the time were kept down by a superpower patron, armed with unlimited influence and a Security Council veto? Would the USSR have been justified in invading Iraq in the '80s, when Saddam was gassing his "own people" (the same Kurds who have never really wanted to be part of Iraq, and therefore are an interesting group to lump into his "own people")? I seem to recall that every time the USSR attacked anyone (like Afghanistan), they cited humanitarian reasons, and the US replied that these were complete crap. I don't blame them, since it was complete crap. But so is this. If we want to be global cowboys, and ride our white horses with our white hats and six shooters across international borders, we need to do it under a UN aegis.
Containment helps prevent war. It isn't the prettiest strategy in the world, but we don't live in a pretty world. War, on the other hand, has a long record of f*&king everything up, and should be a *last resort*, not the first thing on one's mind.
I would read Dr. Blix's "Disarming Iraq" for a thorough, unbiased account of what Iraq was and was not doing (and withholding), and some pretty reasonable theories as to why. If you can, at the end of it, really say that this was sufficient justification for going to war, I suppose we'll just have to disagree, but it certainly paints a much less dire picture of the threat Iraq posed than the warmongers did.
Jester