[My Final Heaven]

There is one problem with this whole thing of course, and that is the example of Venezuela that you mentioned. There's plenty of people in Iraq in exactly the same possition, and public opinion for the war is in what you might call a critical down swing. It's never going to get back up at this point, the only thing they could hope for is that it stops dropping, but thats less likely.

This means, that the only thing anyone has to do to get elected is to promise to end the debacle, and it would be political suicide not to do so after promising to do it. Some people do commit political suicide, but less than don't, as it where.

Otherwise, yeah you pretty much nailed it. I think there is another reason in there that you might want to add as point number three, and that was this notion of preventive war. The White house said plainly that if there is a precieved threat of any kind, that they would reserve the right to use military force, now of course that would explain the whole Bull**** about the WMDs right? But the thing is, they couldn't say they where going to do that without turning around and actually doing it now could they? They'd loose credibility. This has had rather an alarming effect of resparking the nuclear arms race, because the reason they chose Iraq was due on the one hand, to it's ecconomic value, but also to it's military defensivelessness. The fact that they were attacked by Middle easterners based out of the middle east made it almost too easy to justify the war to the ignorant red neck american masses that make up thier constituents. What there was no chance of was a military failure in the invasion, because Iraq's military had been so strangled and squelched by the UN sanctions it hardly exsisted anymore and Iraq has no natural terrain of any kind to form an obstacle to a modern army. No jungles, no ravines, no mountains. Only miles and miles of open desert. And cities. But now, North Korea has the Bomb, you won't see tank convoys rolling out of Seol any time soon, and Iran probably has the Bomb by now, might be untested but would you want to risk it? Yet this notion of Preventive war has become the precedent and there isn't any one country in the world left that can reasonably hope to oppose the U.S.