Even if it could be conclusively proven that Saddam Hussein fornicated with animals and ate babies for breakfast, he was still the legitimate head of a sovereign nation, and the United States of America had neither legal nor moral authority to invade and destroy that country.

Rest assured that I've not forgotten this statement! It's one I've thought a lot about since you first made it (in response to my post in fact).

First, before delving into this, I don't want to get sidetracked (which sort of happened last time), so I'd like to clarify your viewpoint. You are saying that a leader of a nation has the sovereign right to do what he will, and that no other country has the authority to try and stop him for committing grievous human rights violations. If this is accurate, then we’re assuming (only for the sake of conversation) that the U.S. went into Iraq for the sole purpose of dealing with human rights violations and there is no issue of political agenda, money, vendetta, or anything else. I realize this probably isn’t an accurate reflection of your viewpoint overall, but I’m trying to trim the issue down to exactly your statement above.

Having said that, to explore your statement it seems to me that I can understand it from three different perspectives (or perhaps a combination of them):

1.As the sovereign head of state, Saddam had the right to do as he wished and we should not have imposed our moral code upon him. To this I’d say that your moral code appears to value the rights and privilege of one person’s position over many people’s basic human rights. That is a stand I could not take, even if I grant for the sake of argument that morals are relative. I refuse to value a position or title above the rights of people who are so grievously being abused as those in Iraq were under Saddam’s regime. What he did to those people should have been stopped; his moral code should not receive a "free pass" because of his position.

2.Strategically it is important that we allow a head of state to rule as he or she will, as attacking a country over differences in a moral code weakens our position to deal with world leaders. I don’t really think this is your position, but I do see a case here that if we don’t give world leaders a “special” status which affords them certain leniency, then it makes it difficult to deal with them on a diplomatic level. I think this would be a hollow argument, however, when placed along side the atrocities that Saddam was committing. I couldn’t imagine telling someone whose family member just gotten viciously slaughtered before his or her eyes that this was a protected right in the name of “diplomacy and politics.”

3.The U.S. as a nation is not a governing body above Iraq, and therefore had no standing in which to carry out judgment upon it. The UN, however, had that right and could have exercised it. This argument I could buy if the UN were a stronger governing body. It isn’t, and I’m not sure that it can be. If there were in existence a governing world body that would take responsibility to police the world I think the U.S. should defer to it. However, the UN is not that body (though I realize there is probably much room for debate on this point), nor does that body seem to exist. So in such a vacuum a strong country like the U.S. has little recourse beyond taking on the responsibility itself.

Of course, in the real world the whole issue between the U.S. and Iraq is more complicated than whether a nation has the right to go in and pull down a regime committing human rights violations. There is the question of motive, as well as questions about other, more dangerous nations and the cooperation of other countries. But if these and other issues didn’t exist, I’d say the U.S. would have been morally justified in attacking Iraq in order to end the human rights violations that were going on there.