I decided it was easier and roomier to respond with a blog post. So I have a number of questions in return (Caz' comments are in red):

"while Germany may not have shot at us first, they still declared war first, and in so doing declared an alliance with those who did strike first (the Japanese)."

Q1) Ignoring for the moment any dissimilarities with Iraq, are you now broadening the definition of enemy of the state to those who declare war on us or who support those that have attacked us?

Careful here. This is where I go aha!

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Q2) Is North Korea, which simply disregarded our kind requests not to dabble with nuclear weapons, an enemy?

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Q3) Japan is thinking about a pre-emptive strike against North Korea's missile deployments. Ironically, we have our own tripartite-type agreement with Japan. Attacking North Korea would be an act of war as seen by North Korea. Would North Korea then be an enemy, even if they did not directly declare war against us and broke no US law?

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So no, its not like Iraq at all. Iraq had never declared any alliance with Al Qaeda or the Taliban (or vice versa).

Cute word alliance. but how about support?

Q4) Are you saying before our invasion, Iraq never allowed al Qaeda to train within its borders? Never harbored al Qaeda terrorists? Never supported the Taliban? Never knowingly supported any terrorists at all? Never had contacts between its chemical weapons program and an al Qaeda financed pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan?

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The secular Sunni Muslims that were ruling Iraq at the time despised the shia and Wahhabi theocrats of the Taliban and Al Qaeda (and still do).

What does that mean? Hitler despised Mussolini and even had to be begged not to break relations with the Japanese, yet they joined forces against us. You have bought into the leftist argument that because groups despise each other or have conflicting agendas they could never ally themselves against the US. Kindly disabuse yourself of such a silly notion.

Q5) Or are you saying because there were no official declarations of Mutual Assistance photographed and videotaped and memorialized by a CNN report that there could not have been any mutual cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime?

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Note that this was... partly also why George Bush Sr. didn't follow Saddam to Baghdad after Gulf War I.

Actually no partial reason could have entered into the equation. Bush Sr, in order to get permission from the Saudis to use their land as a staging area to attack another Muslim country, promised absolutely under no circumstances, to cross into Iraq, but only to stop Saddam from expanding his domain. Despite all the leftist propaganda that Bush Sr. never finished the job, he was prevented from doing so.

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While it's true that Iraq was at war with the United Nations (to which the US was the main contributor). We had them well under our control with nothing but air power.

Q6) Before we invaded Iraq, you knew that there were no weapons programs going on? You had some intel that our air power alone was keeping Saddam from developing nuclear weapons? You knew that Saddam posed no threat, that his refusal to allow inspectors was a bluff to make his enemies think he was a bigger force to reckon with? That because of air power Saddam was not really giving 25 grand to suicide bomber families in Palestine?

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Nazi Germany and Japan's combined forces actually had a chance of defeating us (again, unlike Iraq). Invading Iraq was unnecessary and likely helped and galvanized the Iranians to further their nuclear technology development.

Two things:

1) If you open my post Peaceful Iran and Atomic Weapons and mouse over the photo of the Iranian Nuclear Complex you will see that it was built in 1974 by the Germans. The Iranians never stopped their atomic program and kept plodding along until they elected a madman as president of their country. Which madman I may add was alleged to have been involved in the original hostage taking back in the day of Cowardly Carter.

2) From wikipedia: As a leader of the student organization Office for Strengthening Unity, Ahmadinejad was in on the planning to take over the U.S. embassy in 1979. Al-Jazeera reports that he suggested the students take over the Soviet embassy at the same time. He joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps during the Iran-Iraq War.

So Ahmadinejad's hatred for the US and his ambition to destroy us and Israel was cooked during his stew over our helping Iraq back in 86 and our involvement with the Shah back in 79. The US being in Iraq has practically nothing to do with Iran's current nuclear expansion ambitions.

See also my previous post Iran Going Nuclear a Good Thing. Had we not invaded Iraq at all, had there not even been a 9/11, our madmen friend long ago planned on building a nuclear Iran once he was in power. I know the lyrics to the leftist song "Invading Iraq radicalized otherwise peaceful, moderate Muslims" but I haven't yet found the music appropriate to the words.

Q7) Do you believe that invading Iraq radicalized the Muslims who bombed the trains in Mumbai recently? Or was this just another Muslim attack against non-Muslims because Muslims cannot live with anyone else?

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Now don't get me wrong. I hope beyond hope that Iraq will eventually be transformed into a peaceful democracy full of western tourists... Speculating about the future will get us nowhere though, so for now I can only judge the decision to invade Iraq by the history we have so far, and so far, the invasion of Iraq does not appear to have been worthwhile or justified.

It is not important what has happened so far. When Ronald Reagan went on a binge to vastly buildup the military at every single point one could easily have said, "So far it does not appear to have been worthwhile". Of course, everyone had to shut their mouths when the Berlin Wall came down. Some on the left still maintain that the wall came down all by itself. It just fell. I assume some of these are the same yodels that think the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition.

But as for "so far not being justified",
Q8) What criteria are you using to judge that the Iraq War is so far not justified?

If it's about the number of our soldiers killed, there are no more soldiers dying now than during the peaceful reign of Bill Clinton.

If it's about encouraging terror against us, we have had zero successful attacks against US interests as opposed to the eight when Clinton was President and we were letting things slide.

Are you ignoring the actions by Libya to drop its WMD program, or Syria leaving Lebanon or the whole of the Arab world now pressing for more democracy? Are you, are you?

What exactly is wrong in Iraq? Muslims blowing up Muslims? What's wrong with that? That's what they do everywhere not just in Iraq. Muslims cannot get along even with other Muslims. It's the most hateful, intolerant species of religion in the world. Our being in Iraq has nothing to do with Iraqi mortality rates. Fewer are dying now than when Saddam was in power only now it's more equally distributed among the various sects. I have no problem with that.

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You see? We have the same goal in mind but two different ideas about how to meet it. How does characterizing we who support a certain plan as "defeatists" and "enemies of the state" help us to meet our shared goals?

I never said anyone who disagrees with me or the policies of the US or with Bush is an enemy of the state. I said leftists and defeatists are. It happens that I disagree with our Iraq policy. I disagree with taking non-uniformed enemy combatants as prisoners. I disagree with President Bush that Islam is the Religion of Peace. I disagree that we are in a war only against Islamic extremists. I think we should also have invaded Iran and bombed the missile facilities of North Korea. I think we should stop allowing Muslims and especially Saudis into this country. But I do not denigrate our troops nor do I demonstrate in our streets making our enemy think that America is weak and divided and that if only they would persevere they will succeed against us.

During a time of war, especially since we are every single living day uncovering plots to destroy us, during this time it is criminal to let our enemies see any weakness in our resolve to combat them. I'm sorry that you think this time in American History is appropriate for an academic discussion about the pros and cons about being in Iraq or who we should attack or should not have attacked. It is not.

If Congressmen behind closed doors want to pore over military and intelligence documents and make decisions without our enemies listening, fine. But for cowardly defeatist bastards like Murtha, may he rot in hell, to publicly say that our military is rotten to the core, while we are actively engaged with the enemy, is beyond treasonous; it's beyond comprehension. There is, of course, no room to print all of the seditious lies of the lilly-livered Murtha scum at this time, I only have 5 gigs of storage on my server. Is that hyperbole enough for you?

There is nothing wrong with someone writing "I disagree with our being in Iraq." It's quite another to meet with President Hugo Chavez and support anti-war activists at the 6th World Social Forum.

Yes, we are in America and men can have differing points of view. But self-preservation and common sense should tell you when and where to keep your mouth shut.
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"Suppose I discover free hydrogen fusion"

And you accuse me of insane straw-man arguments? I think no actual response beyond that is warranted.

Actually the best hypothetical questions are ones so divorced from reality that preconceptions or biases are less likely to creep into the consideration of their analyses. In other words, no one really believes Aesop's Fable of The Hare and the Tortoise that animals can talk or that such a race ever happened. It's totally absurd. Yet stripped of all details about national origin or physical deformities or the type of road or mode of transportation or fuel consumption and other irrelevant minutia, its simplicity reveals a lesson.

So since you refuse to answer my hypothetical let's try something even simpler: Here's Aesop's The Man Bitten by a Dog:

A MAN who had been bitten by a Dog went about in quest of someone who might heal him. A friend, meeting him and learning what he wanted, said, "If you would be cured, take a piece of bread, and dip it in the blood from your wound, and go and give it to the Dog that bit you." The Man who had been bitten laughed at this advice and said, "Why? If I should do so, it would be as if I should beg every Dog in the town to bite me."

It happens to be the opposite of that old adage, never bite the hand that feeds you. Cindy Sheehan should take note. Helping evil only increases its blood lust to injure you more. As I've said before, I am opposed to the death penalty on civilized grounds. However there would be nothing lost in the world if some kind Muslim man would show her some Islamic hospitality.

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Related:

cigar intelligence agency, [Defunct blog],
Just too funny

Trash talk-show host Jerry Springer, perhaps best known for his shows featuring clothes-ripping catfights on stage, says America is "becoming more liberal".

With less than four months before the 2006 general election, liberals, progressives and Democrats have already won the national debate on where America should go, Democratic activist and talk-show host Jerry Springer told a gathering of the Sarasota County Democratic Party on Tuesday night...

Yeah, right. The Democratic Party hasn’t even managed to represent the interests of a majority of its own members for years. Now Jerry thinks it represents most Americans? Can I get a barking moonbat alert here, please?