Bush used classic bait-and-switch manipulation to get our country into Iraq

Your only point worth addressing is that you refute the fraud part because they could have hid them. For the rest of your argument, you seem to forget what my thesis is and why you are refuting it. You are actually not refuting my thesis, because you seem to agree with it "If he did bait and switch, Im glad". I guess you don't really HAVE to refute my thesis per se because people don't vote on how good your argument is anyway. All the words we are writing in this box have very little net effect on the votes, compared to simply taking the pro or con stance on the title. As to your only point, anonymous, the fact still remains that we did not find WMD. I realize that there could exist a huge arsenal of nuclear warheads and plasma rifles in some ditch somewhere in the Iraq desert, but what do you propose we do? Stay there FOREVER so that they never get to use them? How much is 720 Million dollars a day, indexed to inflation, over the next 50-100 years? If Saddam's regime was still in power, we would at least have the benefit of knowing that there was a security force keeping those weapons out of the hands of terrorists. If those weapons are lying in the sand right now, who do you actually think is going to unearth them now? There is only one organization that is going to find them, and it is not headed by President Bush - I assure you. If we haven't found the WMD by now, after 5 years, then our chances of finding them have already been reduced to nill. Your argument rests on the fact that Saddam Hussein may have used the WMD or given them to someone that could have. This argument is absolutely absurd. If hussein developed and distributed these weapons he would be inviting a massive retalitory nuclear strike against his country. What kind of logic fails to take this into account? How could you possibly reasonably suggest that Saddam Hussein would be stupid enough to take those weapons and A) use them against us, incurring a massive nuclear retalitory strike or B) give them away to someone who would use them who we could reasonably connect BACK to him and again, incurring a retaliation that would overwhelm his national defense (as we did in the early 90's) and hold him accountable? I just don't see any way in which he would logically be inclined to provoke our gigantic military into invading and conquering Iraq AGAIN. Hussein was simply the scapegoat to justify the Bush regime's war, and they had him executed swiftly to make sure he didn't get a chance to tell the world his side of the story. I would also point out that by the turn of the next century, most countries will most likely have developed nuclear capabilities. Our actions today are showing these future nuke holders how we will react to them developing nuclear technology. Either we can show them that our countries can exist peacefully, or we are going to fall, through nuclear war, as more and more countries begin to develop power and hatred for us. We cannot hope to defend ourselves militarily against a planet full of nuclear armed armies, and we must show them that we are not going to be invading and occupying everyone that develops themselves technologically. Nukes are a form of technology that naturally develops over time when science is allowed to evolve, and we cannot legislate it away, intimidate it away, police it away etc. There are a handful of ways in which our country (or humanity in general) can be annihilated in one fell swoop. Yellowstone national park caldera erupts every few milion years or so, we get hit by a large meteorite every once in a while, large earthquakes, virus, flood, tsunami, or even an ice age. Over the last 500 million years, scientists have uncovered 10 major extinction events, due to one of these causes. But all of the chances of all of these events put together, does not even come close to the chances of a nuclear war wiping us out in the relatively near future. Every century, the chances are about 1 in 5,000,000 that a major extinction event will occur, but I would say that the chances of a nuclear disaster, over the next century or two, will be no better than the flip of a coin. I don't believe we are taking the best action to secure the prosperity of our race in the long run.