"ultimately are more concerned with protecting against imminent or looming threats to the peace and security of the nation and themselves"

Even when those imminent and looming threats are trumped up?

The American public may not care, I'd bet that the families and friends of 200 dead American soldiers do care.

Read David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" to see what happened the last time the American public cared less about the truth, or better yet, cared less whether or not the administration was making decisions based on the truth. And you'll also understand just what a crock the "domino theory" and US-USSR missile gap" really were.

We may very well be there for the right reasons. But the more I hear about trumped-up data, the less I trust the reasons.

Well now it looks like one of the primary allegations AGAINST the administration was trumped up. So by extending your logic does this make Bush's critics less reliable for relying on made up charge?

The bottom line is the administration said they believed Iraq was had/working on WMD, and shared the evidence, and most of the senators R and D agrred; including Lieberman and Kerry. They are cowards for not admitting if this was a mistake of the admin it was there mistake too.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the "domino theory" held that if Vietnam went communist, it would take its neighbors with it. Even after we bled Vietnam dry -- leaving it too exhausted in manpower to consider much foreign expansion beyond the South -- that's still exactly what happened in Cambodia, with genocidal results.

Also, if Halberstam's fact-checking in that book was as bad as it was in "Summer of '49," I'm not sure I'd put a ton of stock in his claims.

The bottom line is that there is no bottom line on this obtuse partisan effort.

How is it that we so willingly let ourselves forget that THIS WAR WAS FOUGHT TO ENFORCE RESOLUTION 1441? Why is it now *our* burden to justify the campaign, when neither Saddam (whose burden it was all along under seventeen UN resolutions) nor the UN gave us any choice in the matter?

I'm sure the families of the dead are grieving...they always do. Are you suggesting those troops died in vain?

Why are you so willing to cut off the search for the weapons after a few months, when the UN was willing to give its inspectors UNLIMITED time to find them?

"There's no misunderstanding this, except by men bent upon misunderstanding it." --Abe Lincoln

Responding to the first comment here, I'm a bit flummoxed by the continuing assertion that we, the American people, knew absolutely nothing on our own about Iraq without having it filtered to us through the President and the intelligence services. Its not like we had never heard of Saddam Hussein and Iraq before Bush started emphasizing them.

We had seen the war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, the flouting of every major UN resolution, the gassing of Kurds, the horror stories of torture, murder and rape, etc... All of this was in the most public of records and news media. Only on certain factual questions of how far along their WMD programs were was there any significant reason for doubt, yet there can be little doubt that Saddam's intentions were not benign.

My point is that the American people had a good sense of the Iraqi regime and agreed with the idea of ending it, rather than waiting around to prove the allegations against it beyond a reasonable doubt. Good riddance.

I feel the greatest of sympathy for anyone who died or will die in Iraq. But the American people went into this, or should have, with their eyes open. Our engagement in Iraq is a serious commitment, to which we still must do a lot of work, and part of a larger struggle. I guess I just think the average American is still, post-9/11/01, in a lot more belligerent and clear-thinking mood than many may realize. But there's no doubt I'm generalizing...

Were we or were we not decieved?

Was Iraq indeed a looming or imminent threat? Or could they have been contained at a far smaller cost in terms of dollars and human lives?

Was Vietnam a winnable war? At any point?

Had we won in Vietnam, would we have prevented Cambodia?

The questions in Iraq are indeed debatable, I don't think the questions regarding Vietnam are at all.

Over 50,000 American men and women lost their lives in a cause that was thought to be futile even by many of the decision makers at the time. And yet we still marched on because of the fears of the time, such as the fear of the Communists in Russia and China.

And yet Communism was not a monolithic entity. Hence the belief that Vietnam was going to be lost regardless, and the events in Cambodia were not tied to the outcome of the Viet Nam war.

Now we live in fear of terrorism, and are willing to spend our dollars and the lives of our children on taking out Iraq.

Again, the decision maybe the correct one, but the more I hear about trumped up data, the more I distrust the administration's decision making process and actions.

The more I hear, the more I think that Iraq was not an IMMINENT threat...the more I think we had time to build a coalition, to prepare for post-war Iraq, to nail down any loose ends...the more I think that the administration's decisions were driven by the coming elections than by the need to take military action prior to the brutal Iraqi summer.

The administration very well may have made its decision on the desire to have an American presence in the Middle East somewhere other than Saudi Arabia. They may have thought that toppling a dictatorship would be a positive symbol to Iraq's neighbors and a major step forward in the Isreali/Palestinian conflict. They may have thought it was an excellent opportunity to smoke the bandits out and get them out in the open, on our terms. And all of this is fine and good and I can understand why these motives would not be aired publicly.

But again, the more I hear that the adminstration trumped up its data, and the more I hear the administration try to cover up this fact...the more I distrust its motives, be they out in the open or not.

I'm glad the media is reporting on this, I'm not making my decision because the media is telling me to, and frankly, I'm dissappointed that people like the Mad Hibernian seem to be at ease with the fact that the American public could care less if the data was trumped up because they'd come to their own conclusions a long time ago...

...conclusions based soley upon data presented to them by the media and the administration.

Hence the reference to the book by Halberstam.

PS - Remember all the stories about Al Queda being trained on hijacking planes, using a real jet, at a well-known yet unaccessible location in Iraq? Whatever happened to that training facility? You'd think we'd have plenty of proof on that by now. And yet sentiment on the street is still that Iraq was behind 9/11, and many polled think that there were Iraqi's among the 19 hijackers.

So much for public sentiment.

There's a lot there and way too much to respond to...such as the Vietnam War, which I never brought up. So, in accordance with human nature, I'll just skip to the part that mentions me.

I AM at ease with the sentiments of the "American public" on Iraq - I think they are, by and large, rational. There was no one factor or one piece of evidence which justified the Iraq war, it was a culmination of a multitude of factors, evidence and, to some degree, opportunity. Foreign policy shouldn't necessarily be a plebiscite, but in matters of making war popular opinion undeniably matters.

The story of faulty pre-war intelligence is certainly an important story, worth fully investigating in perspective, but I think it pales in comparison to the matters of securing our victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, addressing North Korea's brinksmanship and dealing with Iran's upheaval and nuclear program. I think most average, non-political Americans would generally agree and that was the extent of my perhaps ineloquent point here.

Point well taken.

Still, in looking ahead, it is paramount to trust the information we based our decisions on in the past.

Thus the reason I brought up Viet Nam.

Rumsfield’s counterpart at that time, Robert S. McNamara, was a brilliant and powerful can-do man whose “objective” analysis of all the “right” data told him he was making the correct decisions for four years as our presence in Viet Nam mounted. Any argument made against the US progress to date and the ability to prevail in the future that was presented to him was easily and convincingly parced, disproved and disregarded on the basis of hard, cold facts that he had at his disposal.

By the time he realized that the data he was receiving was tainted and incomplete and that his analysis ignored many other perspectives and truths, it was too late, the build-up had taken on a life of its own and the rest is history.

I'm actually embarrassed to be one of the many who used to toe the line and espouse the theory that the only reason we lost the war was because of the politicians. If the politicians hadn’t interfered and the hippy freaks back home didn’t get led astray by the media our military could’ve gotten the job done.

This is only half true. The war was unwinnable to begin with, regardless of decisions made by the politicians...but it was due in large part to the decisions made by the politicians that we found ourselves in the war to begin with. In other words, we wouldn’t have lost if we hadn’t been there in the first place.

As for Halberstam's fact checking and the Crank's subsequent distrust of his presentation ....Senator John McCain wrote an introduction in which he seemingly had no issues with Halberstam's take on the events and decisions that led us into a “defense against communism” in Viet Nam.

As for the American population’s concentrating on what is important now, we were supposedly doing the same thing then as decisions were made by the executive and legislative branches of the government, and the top brass in the military, in large part so as not to appear soft on communism.

Heaven forbid anyone should question this administration’s actions and appear soft on terrorism.

Again, the decisions being made by the administration may indeed be the right ones, but let’s cut the BS and stop blaming the media for doing something of which we should all be supportive.

And let’s get the chip off of our shoulders about the East coast liberal media/elite taking the rest of the general population to be some sort of inbred band of intellectually-stunted rubes. The questions are being asked, and answers are being demanded, because it is the right thing to do, not because the media is taking the opinions of the general public for granted.