This place has become interesting lately, and no small thanks to you Liah, for showing up and acting as a sort of catalyst. We all talked via email and allowed Krick to take over the old board for the most part. I sense that he's not completely gone by the way...I do smell his STENCH today. He better behave himself or I'll block the whole 195 network. Damn that dynamic IP addressing crap.
Anyway, read my other response to Damian and that says pretty much what I want to say. I don't think it's at all suspicious that the government has ulterior motives- of course they do. It's political, it's economic and it's personal. Sounds like a decent recipe for war to me.
I mentioned before that I don't agree with (or understand) the haste. Your guess is as good as mine on this one. Maybe Saddam is closer to arming his nukes than we know (since weapons inspectors were kicked out awhile ago, he's had some time and obviously hiding something), or maybe Dubya just needs another big win under his belt before the next election. I would think that Tony wouldn't be going along with him if it were the latter. Everyone loves to diss their own leaders, but Tony seems pretty levelheaded to me - much moreso than our junior cowboy. Dubya's good and evil philosophy is preposterous, but it worked well in the days and weeks following Sep 11th. Eventually he'll have to change his tune. He should fire his advisors if they aren't already working on this.
As far as destabilizing the region - weeeeell...it seems kind of unstable right now! This is a common fear, yet it seems to me that Muslims in the region already feel like they've been invaded considering we have a big troop presence in the region. We "attacked" Islam when we went after the Taliban. We "attack" Islam daily by supporting Israel. It's ludicrous, considering the enormous numbers of Muslims in this country who are living well and worshipping at their mosques without persecution (except for those painful days after Sep 11 when some ignorant Americans assaulted those who appeared to be of middle eastern descent- what a disgrace that was).
Oh well. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how this all plays out.