Pavlischek's 'blame Levin/Kerry/Clinton' argument is just that, an attempt to distract from the core issue of 'what kind of war is it?'. The government, press and US body politic were broadly complicit in this war of choice, and what follows that choice is all our tar baby now. It's the kind of choice that our kids and their kids will pay for.

Aquinas speaks of exhausting other means to achieve redress, before resorting to 'just war'.

If you shoot an assailant who is about to batter you, that's self defense, a preemption of imminent crime. If you break in and assault someone, claiming to recover 'stolen property', that's OJ Simpson in Las Vegas, and it's the crime.

To bad we don't teach logic, the difference between a premise (assumed, but not proven), and facts in evidence. Understanding the difference is key to what was meant by 'the Americans are fixing the facts around the policy'.

Repeating that 'we were blind on the ground' in Nov.02-Feb.03 is false, either a deliberate misdirect (something Rove and Wehner's 'office of strategery' practiced to perfection) or a shallow misread of the case file.

UNMOVIC's inspections were transparent, substantial, intrusive and thorough in ways that the inspections terminated by Clinton's 1997 bombings did not achieve. And yet even the 90's inspections and military pressures were sufficient to achieve the functional goal of disarmament, without the bombing.

Thru the office of Blix and El Beradei we had a legal warrant and mil-int grade inspection teams on the ground in winter 03, begging to be given productive leads from the Americans. With an intel budget larger than the rest of the world combined, we had nothing but false testimony to give, Rummy's "We know where they are..."

UNMOVIC's informed response to Powell's 2003 UN performance was that the Americans had withheld nothing, because we had nothing. Powell isn't shamed by being wrong, but by agreeing to be the trusted public face for disinformation of such lethal magnitude. David Kay got it eventually, and resigned a mission he found to be incompatible with his idea of what the USA stands for. Go figure.

A deliberately false causus belli was evident in the 'mushroom cloud' fear-mongering. Crafted deniability reveals intent to deceive in the '17 words.' Anodized artillery rocket tubes aren't centrifuges. The fissionable material and Iraqi expertise were well defined in terms of quantity, location and inactivity, in 2002.

In contrast, the Pakistan/ISI/Kahn proliferation coop was known to be active. In fact, sales and deliveries of their used centrifuges to Iran were occurring, even in while OEF/Afghanistan was being stripped of troops, gear and intel assets for the Iraq invasion.

Such a low standard? How would we raise this standard? We cannot keep eternally second-guessing ourselves to what information we do not have as this leads to eternal inaction. Should we really judge the morality of people's decisions on information they did not have and could not plausibly retrieve? Is it even logical to do so? I have no problem judging the morality of a decision, but I do not think information made available to the decision maker after the decision is made should be a factor in that judgment. As exalted as the members of Congress are, they are not omniscient. Nor is our Chief Executive. Nor are our Generals or Intel specialists. An Intel guy I spoke to once compared Intelligence gathering and analysis to baseball. If you're batting .400 you're doing awesome. By analogy, if you get 40% of your Intel right you are a super spook or have super spooks working for you. Even though we cannot know everything we need to know, life and death decisions still have to be made. Adding the unknown into that choice makes it impossible to make a moral decision.

I'm one who believes the 'entire tree was poisoned.' I believe the incompetence of carrying out the war flowed from false strategic aims.

However, if you believe the war was just, the way it was carried out was immoral and in direct violation of the Geneva Convention.

Warnings about what could go wrong in Iraq were willfully ignored at the Pentagon during the run-up to the war. Instead of a prudent, thought-out plan to replace the vacuum caused by the destruction of a brutal regime - even temporarily - the Pentagon allowed the country to fall into chaos. (Had anybody in the Bush administration ever read Hobbes?)

According to the Geneva Convention, the first responsibility of an occupier is to ensure the safety of the occupied populace. Instead, the occupier stood back and watched as the country's social fabric split apart, its infrastructure was hacked to pieces and even it's museum, a treasure to mankind not just Iraq, was ransacked. Rumsfeld responds: "Stuff happens" and calls raw chaos in the streets 'just' the exuberance of liberation. I don't know whose teaching this falls under, but the sin was immense.

Sure, lot's of things went wrong in WW2, but failed battle plans and military misjudgment played out in the context of a genuinely just war. And those failures were immediately faced and rectified. If they hadn't been, the Allies would have lost.

In Iraq, the civilian and military leaders did not face tactical mistakes for over four years, let alone rectify them, and the Iraqis (our allies) lost big time. I believe the tactical failures flowed from a disastrous strategic decision.

But you don't have to think like me to believe that the multiple failures of the American invasion, left to simmer uncorrected for years, added up to a moral tragedy. Why don't people address that?