There has been tons of coverage on the "soundness" (for those of you who made it through Philosophy 101) of the administration's argument for going to war. The whole idea of not waiting for Saddam to strike cuz then it will be too late. All kinds of questions about "intelligence" and "lack of evidence" were raised. And that's fine and dandy. What I am questioning is the "validity" of the argument. The way to test validity of an arguments is to suppose it's predicates to be true... in our case that would be "Saddam is making or even already has a nuke". I say, "Yeah, so?" So does US... America's got all the "toys" Saddam could ever dream of. How can we demand of someone else to disarm when we are NOT disarming. Moreover, America is the only country to actually use a WMD. Think about it from Saddam's or 3rd party's point of view... and the demand/argument begins to look hypocritical.

Nevermind the "jazzed up" claims... the whole structure, in my eyes, is invalid. But remember, an invalid argument COULD have a true conclusion... the thing is, the invalid argument didn't lead you to it.

No, America is the only country to use a nuclear weapon against an opponent. WMDs can also be Biological or Chemical weapons. Saddam used chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war and against the Kurds.

Although there had been a claim that Saddam was trying to build a nuke, the Bush administration later admitted that this had been a miistake.

The USA has used WMDs, but then, many countries have used chemical or biological WMDs.

There are plenty of differences in context between the USAs use of the nuke in WW2 and Saddam's use of chemical weapons in the Iran/Iraq war.
The US used 2 WMDs against an enemy who had been the aggressor. Saddam started the Iran/Iraq war and used WMDs liberally throughout.
There are various arguments for and against the US use of the nuclear weapon, however I think that on balance, the US was probably more justified in its use of the nuclear weapon (to protect democracies from a nationalistic agresssor) than Saddam (to conquer land and people).

I believe the arguement for going to war on the basis that Saddam was developing or already had WMD was a valid one - wasn't this a condition of resolution 1441 afterall?

The arguement against would have to have either been

A] That there is no clear evidence that WMD exist or existed

or

B] That the UN Security Council decided against war - you cannot take one piece of UN information and use it as justification yet blatantly ignore another

BTW what is the specific area of dbeate here?

<div><table width='50%' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' style='border: 1px solid black' align='center'><tr><td class='maintitle'> Topic closed...</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Reason: Duplicate topic.<br /><br />Recommended action: Please use the search feature to locate a similar topic. If you are unable to find a similar topic, please contact the staff member who closed the topic by clicking the PM button below this post.<br /><br />Helpful links:<br /> - Simple Search<br /> - Advanced Search<br /> - Starting New Topics<br /> - Survival Guide<br /> - The Rules<br /> - Staff Directory<br /></td></tr><tr><td class='darkrow1'><div align='center'>Note: This is an automated response.</div></td></tr></table></div>

Please join us here