There are a few countries that have weapons of mass destruction. Over the years, though, it has been decided that not every country should have them. Do we want to let Iraq have their nuclear stockpile? Syria? Iran? I'm sure Milosevich would have enjoyed his. Pol Pot would have put his to good use, so would a lot of those African dictators.

The problem is, Iraq has these things, in breach of UN resolutions. They are obvious about it and unrepetant. Everybody knows they have them, so if the world just backs down and leaves them alone, that just shows the rest of the world that we never were serious about enforcing our prohibitions. I don't want to go to war with Iraq, but with the current situation (largely manufactured by Bush), we almost have to. Failure to convince Iraq to disarm peaceable, if possible, or forcibly, if necessary, could be devastating to World Peace, opening the doors for genocide and mayhem everywhere. Any dictator could just say he was going to rain down a "sea of fire" on any country that wanted to stop him.

I know the U.S. has the same weapons. I know our government has not always been responsible. We have not, however, used Nuclear Weapons since 1945. Nor have we been using chemical or biological weapons. The Iraqis cannot make that claim. I'm pretty sure that GWB was only implying the use of nukes to deter the Iraqis from using theirs first. There was some discussion at one time of using small nuclear warheads as bunker busters, but I think that idea was scrapped.

Stopping nuclear, chemical, and biological proliferation is, in my view, a fairly powerful argument. Iraq and GWB have created a situation where we cannot just ignore it and pretend like we did not know. The world needs to take a stand now or just accept proliferation as inevitable.

-Biscuits