On the other hand, seeing a huge guy in the bar who keeps looking in your direction and insulting you under his breath, even saying that he would love to see you dead, isn't a good enough reason to go over there and hit him over the head with something that could kill him. Now the second that guy rushes you with a weapon brandished, kill away and feel good about it.
To me that's the fundamental reason why the way we went about invading Iraq was morally unjustified.
Now does that mean I'm saying Saddam was a great guy? No. But it's the principal of the matter.
Tiptup, I think it was you who said the war should have been for oil instead of the search for possible weapons of mass destruction. I don't agree with that either, because it operates on the assumption that if Iraq was allowed to spend their own natural resources on weapons, they could become a bigger threat to the US. Again it's a pre-emptive action that we take because it's possible that Iraq will eventually attack the US.
To me that makes us a guy who went over to the large guy talking smack about us in the bar and killed him just to take his wallet. Telling the bartender: "Well it's obvious he would have just used this money to buy a knife and stab me to death, so I had to do what I had to do."