First of all, let me say that I too don't put a ton of weight on anything that Pat Buchanon says. He has long since burned that bridge w/ the extremist crap that he often spews. In this case, I tried diligently to separate his personal assertions from the actual quoted/referenced text. I also followed up by reading up on the think-tank website that these guys maintain, which contains a lot of position papers issued by them...I don't have the link here at home. I will try to post tomorrow.

In the end, I can pallet the idea of these guys brainstorming policy, since those types of groups are probably a dime a dozen. It doesn't surprise me that they were able to get into the positions that they presently hold. I can even accept that their policies may be slanted a little too far in favor of Israel's interests. However, I take comfort in the fact that public opinion and the influence of Congress should keep this generally at bay. My biggest concern is the general sentiment they express to aggressively attack ALL of the militant terrorist groups, such as Jesbola (etc). I obviously would prefer that these groups be eradicated, but I have heartburn about the fact that many of these groups are not our direct enemies at this point in time. If we actually take the aggressive stance that these men are proposing, I fear that we might actually ignite more hatred for the US than we already see in the Middle East. Right now, many of these groups would rather blow up Israel. I'm not quite sure I want to proactively shift their attention to blowing us up.

Now, I want to shift gear to Iraq again for a minute....

First of all, I too find myself questioning the "imminent threat" portion of the administration's argument. I think that they stretched that one a bit to transition from Afghanistan to Iraq. That being said, I personally think that they had an opportunity to pressure the UN to step up to the task...as I stated before. We still would have been the muscle in that scenario, but we would have forced the UN to follow through on their own threats.

On a related note, as expected, the "No WMDs" argument has surfaced. I find this particular argument to be a bit disturbing. Persons arguing will quickly argue that the lack of WMDs found is proof that the war effort was flawed from inception. What they will not readily agree to is the fact that ALL of Congress (Including Hillary and Kerry) voted in favor of the war, based upon the available intel and the perceived threat...which, by the way, has been subsequently confirmed by Russian intel. In addition to this, they often scoff at the idea that Saddam most assuredly hid all of the weapons in question either out in the desert or probably in Syria, which is presently acting as the terrorist turnstile. To agree to these points, you have to admit that the Bush administration did the right things based upon the information available....and that's not going to happen.

The second of the above points completely perplexes me. If you go through the different UN resolutions and documents, there is ample proof that Saddam had WMDs (yes, probably US-made). While doing that search, you also quickly see that he spent ten years (on and off) giving UNSCUM the runaround and depriving them of unfettered access to Iraqi facilities. Neither of these is disputed. Given that, I'm not sure why everyone can't connect the dots and see that he hid the weapons. Did he just go and destroy them and not tell the UN?....why?...makes no sense. Did he not have them at all?...nope. UN reports document their existence. So, that's not a valid position. Did he use them?...there's no evidence of that, beyond the early days of gassing thousands of his own people (yes, after we encouraged them to revolt and left them hanging). What's left is to assume that Saddam hid the WMDs. It's not a copout....it's the only explanation...simple logic. They had to go somewhere....occam's razor, is it?

I hope it's apparent now that I'm not fully arguing in favor of either side. I am merely trying to address points as they come up. I think that we all are guilty of picking up the party line sometimes without questioning the motives of the particular argument. Right now, the Democrats have selective amnesia concerning their support for this war and their statements concerning the Iraqi threat. Their demigod was the first to admit that Iraq was a problem that needed to be dealt with....too bad he hadn't snatched up Bin Laden when the Sudanese offered him up on a silver platter. No way I wasn't going to toss that out to stir things up.

In reading over this post, I realize that I'm a bit scattered in my argument....Oh well, long day.