The Iraq War was justified

Why is it a strawman? Because I never said that America was good at all. The only time I ever mentioned America was when I said that terrorists attacked American citizens. Therefore, when Con says, 'making the presumption that America and war are really good', he misunderstands everything about it. Also note that Con refuted the Al-Qaeda connection with Saddam, when I never made such a connection. Why is it silly? Because while you may have an interest in weapons too, you're also not an Arab dictator who's killed hundreds of thousands of people with weapons of mass destruction, mostly on his own citizens. Con also calls it a 'passing interest' in nuclear weapons, which means he asserted that Saddam didn't have an actual interest in developing WMD. This is proven false by all of my sources stating that Saddam Hussein planned on restarting his WMD program after sanctions were lifted. That is not a 'passing' interest, it is an active interest. The sources you provided are contradictory anyways. The Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business are cited by that article. This prevents a huge contradiction, because the Lancet actually revised the death doll down to 180,000 Iraqis in 2011 (http://www.cnn.com...). This means that his own cited sources show that the Iraq war didn't kill anywhere close to Rwanda, and since it would save a net 70k people, the war was worth it. Con asserts there is a civil war in Iraq, even though the majority of Iraqis say they feel there is no civil war in Iraq taking place (http://abcnews.go.com...). Since you spent hours working on it, I should present arguments against your Round 2 case as well. - I mostly agree that the trial of Saddam Hussein could have gone better. I think it's worth pointing out two things, though. The first thing is that the United States doesn't recognize the ICC, so asking them to give Saddam a trial there is absurd. The second thing is that many of your assertions about U.S. conduct during the trial are not found in the sources you link. My main point on this is that there would not have been a trial at all if we never invaded. It's not as if he would just give himself up to us if we asked him to. - The point is not that we should invade Saddam for his political decisions. The point is that Saddam Hussein was a huge threat to a lot of people around him, including the United States and the UK. The crux of my argument is that Iraq would inevitably had WMD at one point or another, so even if we didn't find any, it would be better that we invaded Iraq *before* he had them rather than *after*, considering the threat to our troops that would pose, and the risk of WMD being handed over to terrorists. - I'm not trying to say that we should invade a country for harboring people we think harm us. The point of my statements on people like Abbu Abbas was to show that Saddam Hussein was against the United States, and had no problem sheltering its enemies. All this is to show that we should definitely be afraid of an Iraq that's going to restart its WMD program. - Con either lied or misspoke when he said that no American or European citizens has died in Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. The Beltway sniper attacks in 2002 killed tens of people, done by a member of the Nation of Islam who, 'admitted that he admired and modeled himself after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and approved of the September 11 attacks.' The 2002 Los Angeles Airport shooting killed two people and injured four people. I am not trying to make the point that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq before the invasion. I am trying to prove that the invasion has created a situation where we have killed tens of thousands of terrorists, putting an end to the threat they post permanently.