I think I need to really quantify exactly why I am currently aligned more with no-war sentiments in the United States at this point.
I am not specifically interested in stopping all war for all time. I am not even specifically going to respond to attacks that the Iraqi government harms its own people; this happens in many more nations than Iraq and really isn't treated with equal zeal. We sure as heck ignored Afganistan like the rest of the world for years and the Taliban weren't much of a nice people either.
I'm primarily concerned that the inspections have not turned up fruitful evidence that prove that Iraq has broken the agreements on acquiring the weapons after the agreements were made. Forgotten and not destroyed isn't a smoking gun to me. I need to see that the Iraqi government has really decided to stop cooperating at all with inspections and is most likely going to attack a neighbor with acquired weapons of mass destruction. So far, we have no report that says that Iraq is working hard at acquiring weapons of mass destruction and breaching UN agreements.
One former Green Beret who served in the Gulf War in a CNN interview stated that he was willing to volunteer in the past because of the rights of a soverign nation, Kuwait, were being broken. In this case, he doesn't see those reasons, and actually finds irony that we want to break some rights of a soverign nation before we have true international support.
I can see containment, I can see war if required. I don't like to see war that is preemptive, hate-mongering, and not well thought out in international contexts. We contained North Korea for so long, what is different between North Korea and Iraq in a containment situation? It's not like Iraq, as far as the public knows, is related to the September 11th attacks.
The public demands more information.
The public demands let the inspections work.
