LT Smash is ther and has had a great journal on the web. Here he replies to an email about the justification of the Iraq war. Read the whole thing at the link.



LT SMASH - Archives:



But Security Council resolution 688 wasn't the only UN condemnation of the Iraqi regime. Indeed, between 1991 and 2003, the Security Council passed seventeen resolutions condemning Saddam for his humanitarian abuses, and calling on him to cease his banned weapons programs. The final resolution declared him in ''material breach'' of his obligations and warned of ''serious consequences'' if he failed to comply.



Saddam never complied with any of the seventeen resolutions.



A couple of months ago, I visited a village in southern Iraq.



That is to say, I visited the site of a former village in southern Iraq.



You see, it's not there anymore. Saddam demolished it in 1991, after some of the inhabitants participated in the Shiite uprising. It was only a few square blocks of concrete buildings, but they had all been leveled, and were overgrown with desert weeds.



In the middle of one of those demolished buildings, I came across a single shoe. It was a very small tennis shoe, such as might be worn by a five-year old boy. It was covered in dust, cracked and faded.



I took a photo of that shoe with my non-digital camera.



The people who live in the nearby town don't know what happened to the inhabitants of that village but it's a fair guess that they probably were buried in unmarked graves, or dumped in the nearby river.



How many more villages had to be destroyed before an intervention was justified? How many women raped? How many families massacred? How many more children had to die?