Women and Children

From their point of view, all achievements in terms of freedom a.s.f. are void as soon as there is at least one innocent person killed. This is a valid view, in my opinion.

I don’t think that’s valid at all.  That viewpoint is the result of an idealistic worldview, the kind of worldview that never accomplishes anything because it is by definition out of touch with the realities of the world.  Every solution to the Iraqi problem involves death, including the "solution" of non-action, which will simply result in the continued accumulation of casualties by the regime itself.  Rational people cannot allow themselves to be stalled by idealist rhetoric that says "all war is bad because people will die," because every second that is allowed, people continue to die.

bombing and war, which is the mother of all evil.

War is not the mother of all evil; allowing ruthless murdering dictators to go unchecked is much worse (cf Hitler, and now Saddam).  This is particularly true when you consider that the world spent 12 years in a futile attempt at non-war means of ending that reign.

the way this war was forced upon the world by the US-leadership has to be considered problematic.

Some people seem to blame the US for the current state of affairs.  How any person can excuse Saddam and blame the US is beyond me.  Regardless, the US didn’t "force this war" upon anyone.  The weasels (France, etc) didn’t want to do anything about the problem, so they aren’t, and we’re not asking them to.  Those nations who support this war to remove Saddam have made themselves known, and to date there are nearly 50 such nations, with another dozen or so who privately support it.  The fact is that France has done a lot of whining about the US acting "unilaterally" and that is simply propaganda.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The UN is an organisation which is held together by international treaties and the UN is a good thing (tm). Just ignoring it and basically saying "we don’t care what the UN says, we have it our way anyways" destroys decades of international coorperation and could turn out to backfire badly..

With each passing day, it seems more true that the UN is dead or dying, and that like the League of Nations, it will pass.  I tend to agree, especially in light of the fact that its own members actively prohibited the enforcement of 17 of its own resolutions.  Furthermore I’d go so far as to say that the UN is based on a flawed concept to begin with -- the idea that all nations can somehow "just get along" and "all basically agree" on things.  It works for a time while it’s serving a specific, well-defined purpose, but it cannot last forever.  To expect it to last forever is to take that same overly simplistic idealist view of the world.

Plus: military powers don’t prevent terroristic attacks, which is one of the stated goals of this war. This is a goal which (if one uses a little brain one can easily see) cannot be achieved by using warfare against states which support terrorism...

Removing Saddam’s regime will not end all terrorism, and no one expects it to.  It’s only one (rather big) piece of the larger problem.  It would be foolish to not act to remove terrorist states and groups.  Of course by their decentralized nature such groups aren’t "defeated" in the same ways, or in the same timeframes, as traditional enemy threats.  But I don’t see throwing our hands up and saying "we can’t do anything about it" as an acceptable option.  We’re doing what we can, and we’re learning and adapting to these new types of threats.

Terrorism doesn’t need support by states.

That’s not true.  Terrorists need food, shelter, weapons, and general funding, just like any other person/group (well, except for the weapons maybe...)  States like Iraq that directly support terrorist groups (the first casualty in the first night of bombing was a leader of the PLF terror group, who was meeting with Iraqi officials... Saddam gives $10,000 and $25,000 rewards to the families of suicide bombers...) are a good place to start to break down those groups.

coalition troops (who often don’t hae a choice either, that is the fundamental problem of being a soldier)

That’s not true.  Our army is a volunteer army.

Why was the first war in iraq stopped? Why weren’t the opponents of Hussein supported in their effort to rid themselfes of the dictator?

Because the first war was fought to save Kuwait, not to overthrow Saddam.  However in retrospect we probably should have done that too.  Of course, we had no way of knowing that Saddam would break all the agreements he made in the cease-fire.

used to kill kurds with chemical warfare? Why did nobody interfere that genocide back then?

Peter Galbraith, former Iraq expert on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this in an interview:

I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and I included it in the report, which was part of a larger study that we were doing of the Iran-Iraq war.  But frankly at that time, like the Reagan administration, we were more concerned about what might happen if Iran won the Iran-Iraq war, and so this information did not get a lot of focus.

There is a serious problem with your position here, though.  The assertion that we shouldn’t do anything about it now, because we didn’t do anything about it then, is one proffered by many in the anti-war camp.  Of course it’s pure nonsense -- nothing would ever be solved if we made our decisions based on that kind of reasoning -- and furthermore it fails to offer any alternative solutions.

The thing is: nobody buys the idea of america being a moral leader in the world. I hope, the american people don’t buy it either...

Something like 80% of Americans feel we’re doing the right thing, and apparently those 60-plus nations supporting the war do, too.

There’s interests besides freedom and peacein the world.

Of course there are.  We’re not fighting this war for philanthropic motives, we’re fighting it because it’s in our best interests to remove the threat posed by Saddam.  The Iraqi people will be liberated and that’s good too.  It’s not "all about the oooiil!" as some people are implying; we sure as heck could’ve taken Iraq’s (and Kuwait’s) oil in 1991 if we really wanted it.  But to prove the fallacy in your reasoning, let’s assume we are motivated by our evil American greed for oil.  Does that mean we should just leave Saddam in power, because we have multiple reasons for taking him out?  Should we continue to let him torture and murder his people, because our interests are not "purely selfless"?  Should we let the weapons inspections go another 12 years or so, with Saddam revealing bits and pieces until we withdraw our troops from his borders, and he eventually kicks the inspectors out again?  How many UN resolutions giving him "one final chance" to fully disarm do you propose?  The first 17 didn’t do a darn thing, and he didn’t start "cooperating" even slightly until there were 200,000 US troops crowding his turf.  Those forces can’t be maintained there indefinitely.

We probably should have removed him 12 years ago, but the fact is we didn’t, and he needs removing now more than ever.