that pesky war thing

All the hoopla regarding public enquiry into the Iraq war makes it a vaguely appropriate time to post something about my opinions regarding the case for the intervention that commenced on

intervention in the running of other sovereign states is always going to be a bad choice, lives will be ended, property destroyed etc etc. The moral questions posed are hard, and the standards for decision are impossible for us all to be happy with, we all make our own choice in this matter and i find it hard to say who is right and wrong . . . not that i don't say when i think someone is wrong, but I'm always at least a little conflicted when i do.

so what do I think??

I'm convinced there was a moral cause for war, I'm also convinced that the case made wasn't the case i would have made.

Its interesting to look at where individuals get their morality from, when i look at mine i see a worrying influence from the comic books i read in the early 90's, most profoundly seen in the Stan Lee maxim "with great power comes great responsibility."

Fact is Saddam Hussein was a total fucktard who had no problem killing his citizens, and those of other countries, often in particularly brutal ways. Shouldn't we in the wealthy (relatively) free, (relatively) democratic first world bear some responsibility for dragging men like this into the street and dealing with them.

I know this statement begs the question where do you stop, statements about people in glass houses and accusations of cultural imperialism, but lets just imagine we lived in 1984, the world of V for Vendetta, Zimbabwe or North Korea. Wouldnt we want our fellow man to help us throw of the yoke?

I'm painfully aware that solutions like these rarely solve anything (despite what Robert Heinlein told us) but dammit i'd feel much better if the SAS went in and literally gutted the ruling classes of most of the middle east, North Korea, Burma. Clearly it would all go wrong, but god dammit our intentions would be noble!