I only wish that someone would write a set of responses to those "shut them up" lines used by the conservatives today, and one of them seems to be "you can't deny that the world is safer now that Saddam Hussein is out of power".

I'd truly like to see an article entitled WE ARE NOT SAFER. It should not only show that there was no threat from Iraq in the first place, that the "gathering threat" argument is mere propaganda, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It shouldn't just document that our military, which in 2000 was in it's highest and strongest period of readiness in our history, is now stretched too thin for any real new threat, and that we have thousands of relatively untrained reservists working (and dying) in a desert war zone filled with terrorists. It shouldn't even stop with the fact that Iraq has become America's Palestine, a country occupied by a foreign power, filled with angry displaced people living with the perceived (and perhaps accurate) lies that swift progress will be made to return power to the people and the resources of the country will be used for their benefit, not that of the government and corporations of the foreigners.

It should remind us that a world where the greatest super-power in history has adopted a policy of preemptive war is a MORE DANGEROUS WORLD, and everyone except Americans know it! That the point is NOT whether in spite of the lies that were told to get us into a war we NEVER would have agreed to had we been allowed to make our decisions based on the truth, "it's irrelevant because it turned out to be a good idea because we're better off with the results (Saddam the bad man in prison)". The results include tens of millions more people hating our guts, and hundreds of millions of our previous friends and allies having no trust in us, EVEN ABOUT WHETHER WE'D INVADE A COUNTRY THAT DOESN'T THREATEN US SIMPLY FOR POLITICAL & FINANCIAL GAIN!

We've made the U.N., the primary force for world peace and cooperation, weaker and less able to effect change for global benefit. We've made it clear to the world that we cannot be trusted to do what we say, abide by international law, honor our traditional allies, or even be straight with our own people. If a country reflects it's leader, then the world has a right to call America a corrupt and evil empire; for we have become a country that sends it's troops off to be cannon-fodder in a war to enrich it's most powerful, and refuses to even honor or acknowledge it's hundreds of military dead and thousands of wounded, fearing the "bad P.R." that would bring. A nation of war-mongers and robber barons, bereft of honor.

Sadly, Jeff