Presidential Debate

[Armin]

Watergate involved the criminal breaking and entering of a psychologists office by the Presidents men at his direction to plant illegal wiretapping equipment so that he could dig up dirt on his political opponents. This is no Watergate

Too true. No one was hurt and certainly nobody killed in hotel Watergate...

More than 1000 US and coalition soldiers and in excess of 37000 Iraqi people (many, if not most, of them civilians) were killed since the invasion began. Watergate was NOTHING compared to THIS crime.

If I tell you I believe something to be true, and then later find out I was wrong, was I lying to you?

Absolutely, especially if, only a few months before, you had miracuously known the exact OPPOSITE to be true:

24 Feb 2001 In Cairo, Secretary of State Colin Powell declares: "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. [source: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm]"

It's not exactly coming from some leftist acivist, right? The bloody secretary of state KNEW - half a year before 9/11 - that Iraq had NO WMD and posed no military threat to it's neighbors - let alone the US.

Also:

The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04]

Just FYI: David Kay is neither French, nor German or from some other cowardly "old Europe" nation :P

And that it was the Bush admin that demanded links between Iraq and Al Quaeda and evidence about WMDs produced from it's CIA advisors, not vice versa, the poor ignorant government believing what they were told. Just one of many articles: http://antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=1839
There are dozens of statements out by former CIA analysts and associated experts about the huge amount of pressure they were under. Pressure to come up with something in the first place. Who believed what and why?

Come on, this is so BLATANTLY obvious...

I think if this war was linked to fighting the global war on terrorism, then that linkage needed to be made clearer

Uh-huh...
Like, for instance, making clear that Saddam's Baath party was a secular militarily oriented regime (once actually a socialist party) that SUPPRESSED religious fundamentalists in Iraq everywhere? That actually KILLED islamistic avtivists in Iraq by the hundreds? That was hated and despised by the Shiite clergy in Iran and the Shiite population in Iraq? That had NO common ground whatsoever with Al Quaeda and other islamistic terror organisations but a common hatred of America and the West?

And, also rarely mentioned, the fact that Saddam was mainly mad at his former ally, the US, for first diplomatically greenlighting his Kuwait adventure and then, at the demand of their more important Saudi allies, turning coat and starting the first Gulf war...
Should that be made clearer?

We all know that this toilet needed cleaning, but nobody wanted to get dirty

And, conveniently, ignore the fact that it was the US and it's allies that, once again, had created the toilet in the first place. That Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had funded Saddam's war against Iran while Iran was still the great devil, that American military advisors had supported Iraqi troops, that the US even provided help in acquiring weapons and military intelligence (even satellite imagery) to aid Saddam's war effort. And that the technology for Saddams WMD he actually - back then in the 1980's - used against Iranian troops (and later the Kurd minority in his own country) had been developed with American aid.
But the audience in the US gasped in shock when Oprah showed the picture of a certain Mr. Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein... come on, this has been common knowledge.

Unfortunately, there are other cesspools waiting for our attention.

And that's what the world is afraid of...

Well, at least *I* can breathe in relief. Concindentially, the second largest untapped reserve of crude oil in the world is under Iraq, not under the Black Forest where I live ;)