Let’s open this up with a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion: There’s a mur­derer liv­ing in your com­mu­nity. He’s struck before and one of your neigh­bors, the rich­est and most pow­er­ful guy in town, is con­vinced he’s going to strike again. Rich Guy tells every­one in town that the mur­derer is a bad guy and needs to be taken care of, that he has a tor­ture cham­ber in his garage and that he’s a threat not only to you but to the whole town. To top it off, he beats his attrac­tive wife and abuses his chil­dren. But no one wants to join Rich Guy’s lynch mob. And the cops aren’t much help; they say they have no evi­dence that he’s done any­thing lately. He’s a wily crim­i­nal and cov­ers his tracks. But he gives you and every­one else in town the creeps.
Finally, Rich Guy decides to take the law into his own hands. One day, after repeated warn­ings, he shoots the old guy dead in the street in full view of every­one. The com­mu­nity is secretly glad he did it, and — bonus! — his attrac­tive wife and chil­dren are no longer ter­ror­ized. Why, you might even date her your­self although Rich Guy has already started woo­ing her.
One small prob­lem: As Rich Guy is rum­mag­ing around in the murderer’s house, he can’t find a sin­gle instru­ment of tor­ture or the mur­der weapons that he used on his pre­vi­ous vic­tims. All signs, in fact, point to a decrepit old man whose reign of ter­ror — which at most extended to his front lawn — would soon be com­ing to an end any­way. There are no indi­ca­tions he was able to kill again. How­ever, Rich Guy does find the old man’s per­sonal for­tune stashed away in mason jars, which he said he would take “to hold on to while his wife and child recover from their hor­ri­ble ordeal.“
So now Rich Guy has killed a man — who no doubt deserved to die and could hardly be con­sid­ered inno­cent — but he’s bro­ken the law. He com­mit­ted mur­der and there’s really no deny­ing that.
Should the cops now lock him up? Pros­e­cute him for first degree mur­der? What would you say if this sit­u­a­tion hap­pened in your com­mu­nity?
You’re prob­a­bly think­ing to your­self, “Well, if that mean old man was really about to do some nasty stuff, per­haps Rich Guy should get manslaugh­ter or jus­ti­fi­able homi­cide.” But the mean old man’s means of ter­ror­iz­ing his neigh­bor­hood are incon­ve­niently absent. Do you still trust Rich Guy? Would you look at him count­ing the old man’s money with his arm around the beau­ti­ful widow and think, “Ah, hell, the wife and child are happy so all’s well that ends well”? Would you shrug and think, “This is the kind of town I want to live in! Who needs cops when Rich Guy can take care of the bad guys?“
But what hap­pens if Rich Guy is wrong?
Okay, this was obvi­ously an anal­ogy for Iraq and the United States, and this report from the Wash­ing­ton Post makes it clear that not only is the search for weapons of mass destruc­tion com­ing up empty, it’s look­ing increas­ingly futile. As the Post says:

The 75^th Exploita­tion Task Force, as the group is for­mally known, has been described from the start as the prin­ci­pal com­po­nent of the U.S. plan to dis­cover and dis­play for­bid­den Iraqi weapons. The group’s depar­ture, expected next month, marks a mile­stone in frus­tra­tion for a major declared objec­tive of the war.

The task force is being shut­tered next month, and the num­ber of fruit­less mis­sions paints a damn­ing indict­ment.
CENTCOM began the war, the story says, with 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched, with noth­ing com­ing up in the first 17. Another list had 68 top “non-WMD” sites that might offer clues to the loca­tions of nuclear, bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal weapons pro­grams. Forty-five have been dead ends. Despite the Bush administration’s asser­tions that the inspec­tions have barely begun and — irony alert! — must be given time, Task Force 75’s inspec­tion of the high-priority tar­gets has been marked by poor intel­li­gence on the part of Wash­ing­ton or poor secu­rity that led to sites being looted or burned. This means that any mate­ri­als that might have been used to pro­duce WMD are now miss­ing, which is what this was was allegedly fought for.
“Am I con­vinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from the bot­tom of my heart: We stopped Sad­dam Hus­sein in his WMD pro­grams,” said Army Col. Richard McPhee, accord­ing to the Post. “Do I know where they are? I wish I did … but we will find them. Or not. I don’t know. I’m being hon­est here.“
But the key parts of this arti­cle are the ones that show how poorly the retroac­tive search for a casus belli is going.

“We came to bear coun­try, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn’t here,” said a Defense Intel­li­gence Agency offi­cer here who asked not to be iden­ti­fied by name. “The indi­ca­tions and warn­ings were there. The assess­ments were solid.“
“Okay, that par­a­digm didn’t exist,” he added. “The ques­tion before was, where are Sad­dam Hussein’s chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons? What is the ques­tion now? That is what we are try­ing to sort out.“
One thing ana­lysts must recon­sider, he said, is: “What was the nature of the threat?”

The sus­pi­cion that the Amer­i­can peo­ple — and the United Nations — were not sim­ply mis­led but actively lied to by Team Bush to gain sup­port for this war leads to a bit of a queasy feel­ing. At least it should.
Look, I’m not deny­ing that good came of this and that the Iraqi peo­ple likely will even­tu­ally be bet­ter off, but I do have to ask some ques­tions to the peo­ple now crow­ing that what the United States did was right:

1. Was the good that came out of this worth the prob­lems and costs now fac­ing the United States?

2. Was it worth it to sad­dle the United States tax­payer with a multi-billion dol­lar com­mit­ment to Iraq when the nation’s deficits are climb­ing ever higher and the econ­omy is as stag­nant a Florida swamp?
3. Was it worth the dam­age to inter­na­tional order and alliances that has been done?
4. Why did the United States start a war armed with a quiver full of lies?
5. Is this the kind of world you want to live in?