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I think the fact alone that he is a dictator does not justify us attacking him, unless we are now adopting the unbending position of removing all dictators everywhere and refusing to support any of them any more. And we certainly can't use that as a moral argument when we have supported him in the past and support others right now.

If Iraq is so dangerous on those counts, why have we ignored them for more than a decade? Also, on those counts, Iraq isn't much different from its neighbors.

I'm going by memory here, so I could be wrong on a few of these points, but I'm pretty sure that Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt have significant ties to assorted terrorist groups -- more than just Palestinian suicide bombers -- and I'm pretty sure that most of the ME, with the probable exception of Israel, has said that they don't think Iraq is destabilizing.

It's hard to believe that all of the countries over there aren't trying to build WMDs -- Pakistan has got 'em (and that's the first place we thought bin Laden was going to run to), as does India, I'm pretty sure Iran is known to be pursuing them, I'm not sure about Egypt, but they're on the list of countries we sell weapons to, so it's possible they've been "permitted" to build them, and if Saudi Arabia isn't, that's probably only because we're such good friends with them (who needs a nuke when you've got the US? -- and throw Kuwait in this pile too).

Look at all of the ME, and Iraq just doesn't seem that exceptional.

Over the last 20-30 years or so, Iraq hasn't done anything significant other than invade Kuwait, which we promptly put an end to, and I don't see much reason to believe he'd try it again. The only obvious change that resulted from that is that Iraq went from ally to enemy and we clamped some major santcions on them, which Saddam then used to harm his people with while blaming us for it. So Saddam is a very vocal enemy of the US -- and one has to wonder what the hell we were trying to do with those sanctions -- but as it is we're not exactly loved over there anyway.

So I guess I'm answering your question with a question: Why Iraq and why now?

...and you can be a 'liberal' and not a Democrat.

In many cases, I find the Democratic party the lesser of the two evils.  However, I find it terribly obvious that the two parties absolutely agree on one point:  Getting re-elected.

Besides that, they're more interested in arguing against ANYTHING that the other side has to say instead of thinking rationally about the situation.  Giving the knee-jerk 'party line' is so much easier. 

It's bad enough that politicians will do it, but it's rather distressing to me to see young people doing the same thing:  subsituting party-speak for real opinion...sometimes to a ridiculous degree.